Our mission is to make money work for everyone. And to build a bank that best serves our diverse and growing base of more than 5 million customers, we need to build a company that includes people from all backgrounds and communities, and helps them thrive.

Between our last update in 2020 and the end of 2021 we've grown from 1,400 people to more than 2,100. And we've increased the percentage of Monzo staff who share diversity data with us by 11ppt to 76%.

And in that time we’ve also made significant progress on a number of our diversity and inclusion goals. But there’s still plenty of work to do, and we’ve identified the areas where we need to improve, and set out our plans to make progress.

Women and People of Colour are more likely to be underrepresented in higher-paid positions like leadership roles and technical jobs like data or engineering. So we’ve been especially focussed on growing representation in these areas.

We’ve seen better representation of People of Colour, increasing from 15.2% to 21.7% in leadership (like Directors, Vice Presidents and at C-Level) and from 17.1% to 26.2% in technical roles. This is mainly driven by growing representation of non-Black People of Colour, so we’ll be working on increasing Black representation in these areas.

Bringing more women into leadership at the company’s most senior levels has helped us reduce our gender pay gap significantly, by 16ppt to 4.0%.

Across all our leadership levels, representation of women is at or above 30.0%. 44.0% of the board and executive committee roles combined are now filled by women, so we’ve met our goal as signatories of the Women in Finance Charter to have women make up at least 40% of those groups by 2020.

Representation of women across Monzo has increased from 45.5% to 47.3% and in all leadership roles is up from 34.3% to 35.0%. The representation of women in technical roles has increased from 21.9% to 22.7% and in technical leadership from 14.6% to 15.2%. We’re behind where we’d like to be, so growing these areas is a key focus for us next.

We make sure we attract a diverse group of candidates for every open job role. We guide hiring managers on how to write inclusive job descriptions. For example, we use software to scan for gendered language so we don’t use it in a way that could exclude people.

When you apply for a job at Monzo, we give you the option to share demographic data with us. This data is not identifiable and we keep it completely separate from your application. We use it to understand where to improve. For example, it showed us we needed to attract more People of Colour and women to apply for technical jobs in areas like engineering and data. So we’ve taken actions like publicising our referral programme to underrepresented groups who already work here, to encourage them to refer qualified friends, family and former colleagues for jobs at Monzo.

We’ve made our interviews more inclusive. We make sure our interview panels are diverse so candidates meet and are assessed by a diverse group of staff. And before anyone at Monzo can interview candidates, we educate them about biases that can impact interviews, and how to interrupt them.

When you come for an interview, we give you the option to share your pronouns and tell us how to pronounce your name – so we can address you correctly on the day. We’ll also ask you what else we can do to make the interview more inclusive. (We can do things like provide a British Sign Language interpreter if you need one, for example.)

We’ll continue to work on our People of Colour representation to reflect the ethnicities where our offices are located and the industry we’re in. Our representation of People of Colour and Black people is in line with the fintech industry, where 20% are People of Colour and 3.1% are Black. But we want to work on our representation so it gets closer to reflecting London, where 25.0% of our staff are based and diversity is greatest. According to the 2011 census 13.3% of Londoners are Black.

We’re working to increase the representation of women and People of Colour (with a focus on Black and Mixed Black people) in our board, executive committee and overall leadership team.

We’re partnering with Coding Black Females to recruit more Black women for technical roles. Coding Black Females are the UK’s largest community of Black women working in tech, and we’re working with them on a series of events and a mentoring programme between our engineers and theirs.

We’re building inclusion through mutual mentoring. We’ve created a mutual mentoring programme where currently we are matching members of our senior leadership team with Black colleagues for a two-way partnership to explore inclusion and race equality. Black colleagues help non-Black senior leaders develop knowledge and confidence in different areas of diversity and inclusion, while leaders offer them guidance and support with their career.

We check we’re measuring staff performance fairly. We now use diversity data to look for bias in our performance management process and make it more inclusive. For example, we check the demographics of the people we’re promoting to make sure we aren’t disproportionately favouring or overlooking one group.

Working to improve representation is only part of what we need to do to build a diverse and inclusive company. As well as diversifying the make-up of our team, it’s crucial we create an environment where everyone feels included and able to succeed.

That’s why we’re working to develop inclusive practices across a range of areas – from religion to sexuality.

In 2020, when asked about their sexual orientation, 23.8% of staff said they were part of the LGBQ+ community (lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and asexual). Representation is now 21.8%, which remains significantly higher than the 2.7% the Office for National Statistics estimates for the rest of the UK population.

We now have broader choices when collecting sexual orientation data, to include pansexual and prefer to self-decribe and a separate question on trans identity to support our existing gender identity question.

The majority of the team are agnostic, atheist or otherwise non-religious, 17.1% are Christian, 5.2% are Muslim, 0.8% are Buddhist, 0.9% are Jewish, 2.2% are Hindu, 0.8% are Sikh, and 2.5% follow a different religion.

We work with community groups to design our approach to diversity and inclusion. The People team collaborates with our community groups to design our strategies. And we have regular discussions with different communities to understand how we can improve their experience of working at Monzo and better meet their needs.

We’ve created spaces for our staff to connect. We have dedicated Slack channels for different community groups like #pride, #black-monzo, #parents, or #neurodiversity, for people to connect, discuss challenges and share ideas. We also have private spaces, like groups for people with chronic illnesses or disabilities, or for people who identify as transgender or gender non-conforming, for example.

We educate everyone about diversity and inclusion. Through events and training, we’re helping everyone learn more about diversity and inclusion, privilege and how it plays out at work. Our goal is to build empathy and understanding for different experiences.

We also run an ‘experience walk’ activity which helps teams explore different experiences that are shaped by privilege structures in our society. We invite the group to anonymously answer questions like, “have you ever been mistaken as someone else from the same ethnicity?” or “have you had to skip an event because it wasn’t accessible?” After each question, we reflect on the outcomes and discuss our different experiences.

We’ve also hosted events so we can learn and discuss together. For example we welcomed LGBTQ+ charities to to discuss experiences with HIV or a disability, or, being Transgender or Non-Binary.

We celebrate dates and rituals that are important to our colleagues’ cultural identity. On religious festivals like Diwali or national days like St David’s Day, we serve food as part of our free lunch offering and encourage people to share their perspectives.

We support people to practise their religion. We have prayer rooms for staff of any faith to use throughout the day.

We also give everyone the choice to opt out of the traditional bank holidays, and take other days off instead. So if you want to work through Easter and take time off to celebrate Eid, or be off on your birthday instead of the Queen’s Jubilee – you can.

We think about other accommodations we can make to support people to practise their religion. For example, we supported people to observe Ramadan by giving our customer operations staff the option to change shift times as their schedules changed while they’re fasting.

As a start-up, our team has historically been very young: back in 2018 77% of our staff were under 30. That’s changed as we’ve grown, and in the last year we’ve welcomed even more colleagues who are older, at different stages of life and with different caring responsibilities.

We’ve introduced a series of new policies to support them, and to keep attracting new staff who are at different life stages.

We introduced a policy to offer 10 days of paid leave following any form of pregnancy loss, for either partner. In May 2021 we became the first bank in the UK to introduce dedicated policies of additional paid leave for colleagues who suffer from pregnancy loss. Its aim is to recognise and support our colleagues (of any gender) who experience these emotional and physical challenges.

And we now offer eight days of leave a year for fertility treatments. We offer up to eight days of additional paid fertility leave a year for colleagues undergoing fertility treatments, diagnosis or consultations. They can be used for things like taking time to rest after a procedure or treatment, or to attend outpatient appointments and scans. We’ve also created an employee support group for colleagues going through similar journeys.

We introduced a three month paid sabbatical. This means anyone who’s been with us for more than four years can take up to three months off work, fully paid.

Most people can’t take extended breaks from work because they wouldn’t be able to support themselves without a regular income. This means opportunities to travel, pursue passions, invest in learning and development and more, are only available to a small group of people. This policy is an effort to change that.

We offer flexible working arrangements where we can, so people can fit work comfortably around their lives. That might be working fewer days a week, on different days that suit you, or a job share.

We offer paid maternity, paternity, adoption or shared parental leave. Specifically, we offer 52 weeks of primary caregiver leave: 13 weeks at 100% pay, 13 weeks at 50% pay, 13 weeks at statutory maternity pay, and 13 weeks of unpaid leave. We also offer six weeks of secondary caregiver leave at 100% pay.

Our caregiver leave is available to anyone who’s been working here for 13 weeks or more. We have made it available as early as possible so people are not restricted as to when they can afford to plan a family or move jobs.

Next we’re reviewing our caregiver leave policies and our private medical insurance cover and consulting with our staff to understand what other support and benefits we could add to better cater to different groups. For example, we're looking at improving our support for those looking to seek fertility treatments.

60% of people at Monzo now work remotely full time.

The proportion of people working remotely has increased as we’ve grown our customer operations and engineering teams, who are distributed throughout the UK.

As employees return to the office after the coronavirus pandemic, many of our office-based staff have chosen hybrid working, and spend time working both remotely and in the office.

We’re making sure we work in a way that’s inclusive – whether you’re working remotely or from an office. For example, we follow etiquette that makes meetings inclusive to people joining online or in person.

And we’re investing in technology to make that as smooth as possible. All our meeting rooms are equipped with high quality cameras, screens, speakers and microphones with noise cancellation that allow staff who work remotely to be involved, as if they were in the office. And in team areas in the office, we have hang out areas with screens so you can dial in and keep up with ‘water cooler’ conversation.

We live-stream our monthly company-wide meeting so everyone can watch it, and we’ve added microphones to pick up ambient sounds, which really add to the sense of being in the room! And we have a dedicated Slack channel called #remote-chat where we all chat so people get involved online, even if they’re watching the meeting in person.

We have special benefits for remote workers, and make sure all our benefits are relevant regardless of where you work. We pay for equipment that remote workers need to do their job – like an office chair, a desk and a computer monitor so you can work comfortably from home. Teams have a monthly budget for socials which they can use to get together remotely. And we chose benefit providers (like our health insurers) that offer services across the UK and not disproportionately in London.

Since our last report we’ve seen the proportion of people with only school qualifications (A level and GCSE) increase by 5.5ppt to 25.3%, while the proportion of people with university degrees has gone down by 6.8ppt to 63.1%.

The percentage of people who are part of the first generation in their immediate family to go to university or didn’t go to university increased from 50.0% in 2020 to 51.6% in 2021.

The percentage of people who went to a state school has stayed around 68% and the percentage of people who qualified for free school meals has stayed the same at around 20%.

Whilst educational diversity is improving, which is usually one indicator of socioeconomic status, we’ve actually also seen a decrease in the proportion of people who self-identified as being from a lower socioeconomic background (down 2.6ppt to 26.7%). The proportion of people who said they aren’t sure if they’re from a lower socioeconomic background has gone up by 2.4ppt to 15.5%.

We’ve removed unnecessary must-haves in our job ads, like requiring degrees for roles that don’t need them.

We’ve piloted a programme to train customer service staff to code. To improve the socioeconomic diversity of our engineers, we’ve started a programme to train some of our customer service staff to code. Our customer operations staff are more likely to not have formal degrees (48% of customer operations staff have degrees, compared to 63% in other roles). Which means they’re less likely to access higher paying jobs like engineering.

Our first group completed their training and are now full-time engineers in our borrowing team.

We plan to continue to work to improve access to jobs at Monzo for those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. We will keep collecting data to better understand how things are changing and where else we need to improve.

Our mission is to make money work for everyone. And if we want everyone to have access to Monzo, our products and features, we have to consider everyone's needs. We stay close to the latest developments in standards, for example, BS ISO 22458:2022 is a new international standard on consumer vulnerability. We’re also working on how we can make our workspace more accessible for our staff.

We consider accessibility when we build our products. We’ve updated our processes to make sure we consider accessibility as early as possible when we develop our products or make changes to our services. For example, our terms and conditions are available in audio format to make sure they’re still accessible to customers who are partially sighted.

And we consider accessibility and inclusion when we design our services. For example, we make it easy to change your preferred name and use it on your Monzo card. This is usually a difficult, time-consuming and stressful process and affects a lot of trans people. We train our customer service teams to help customers who are trans sort this out with as little trouble as possible.

In the coming year we also plan to introduce a wider range of alternative formats for our documentation, expand the topics of our help articles and update our web pages to help customers understand the support we can offer.

We became the first bank to join the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute’s Mental Health Accessible Lite programme. The Mental Health Accessible Lite programme gives an overview of a firm's accessibility for people with mental health problems. The Money and Mental Health team spent three months reviewing our policies, procedures, training, product and service.

They shared their findings with us, which include where we’re doing well and what we could do going forward e.g. delivering more specialist mental health training for our customer operations team.

We’ll keep learning about different accessibility needs. We’ll continue to co-host events with charities where we hear from people with lived experience of various support needs so we can understand some of the obstacles people face when they’re using banking services.

Working alongside the charity Surviving Economic Abuse, we’ve also improved our services and delivered specialist training across our Disputes and Complaints teams on how to identify and support survivors of domestic, financial and economic abuse. Next year we plan to become a signatory of the financial abuse code of practice, and we’ll continue to roll out training.

We gather and listen to our customers' feedback, and use it to make our services more accessible. We encourage customers to tell us about their accessibility needs on our website, in the help section of our app and through a tool called Share with us. It lets customers tell us about their circumstances and if there’s anything we can do to support. For example, you might want to let us know you have a disability, tell us you prefer we contact you a certain way (like calling you instead of using in-app chat), or suggest a service or feature you might find really useful.

We use this information to better understand what our customers need, and design our services and develop our features in a way that meets those needs.

The percentage of people in our team who are neurodivergent has decreased slightly from 11.9% to 11.0% and those who have a disability has decreased slightly from 8.6% to 7.3%.

We’re improving ways of working for our staff: We use our Monzo-wide meetings to educate people on how to support our staff who have a disability or are neurodivergent, for example using the ‘How to work with me’ section of people’s Slack profile to share their needs, and understand the needs of others.

During onboarding, we ask our staff to use Google and Apple accessibility features when collaborating with each other. We also have dedicated guidance in our managers’ handbook on adjustments including workspace and ways of working for people who have a disability or are neurodivergent.

In 2020, 38.4% of people in the company and 20.0% of people in leadership shared they have a mental health condition. These percentages have decreased to 32.7% and 16.6% respectively, but remain above the national average (the NHS says 25.0% of adults experience mental illness at some point in their lives). Due to ongoing stigma around mental health, there’s often reticence to share information and seek support. Our declaration rate is high, suggesting people feel safe to share and we need to support our staff.

We support our staff with their mental health. We have ‘mental health first aiders’ on hand to support those that need it: they’re staff trained in how to listen and signpost their colleagues to the right support.

Staff have access to a 24/7 confidential advice service, which offers support for things like counselling, health,legal advice, how to manage debt, or help if you’ve been bereaved. And our health insurance also provides support for mental health, for example coverage if you want to seek further therapy.

We’re also working on increasing our mental health first aiders’ and managers’ knowledge about how different communities experience mental health, for example people who are neurodivergent, have gender dysphoria, or are going through the menopause.

Having diversity data means we can meaningfully identify problem areas and understand where we need to improve representation and inclusion. We ask our staff for data with their consent through our People system.

We understand this is sensitive data and we take data privacy seriously. We’re transparent about how we use data and make sure we analyse it at a high-level (aggregated) so personal data can’t be linked to anyone.

We've increased the percentage of Monzo staff who share diversity data with us by 11ppt to 76% by making it easier for employees to share and update their data. We also added a step into our onboarding process for new people, to ask them to share information if they want to. The more coverage we have, the better insights we can derive from the data and use to inform our work.

We analyse data about who’s applying for our jobs, to understand where to improve. When you apply for a job we also ask if you’ll share information with us, like your gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation. You can’t be identified through this data, we don’t use this data to make hiring decisions and it isn’t visible to anyone in the hiring process. Rather, it helps us understand where we can improve our hiring process for different communities.

We look forward to building on our progress like increasing People of Colour representation, our policies and reducing our gender pay gap. And we’re ready to continue getting stuck into areas where we need to improve like increasing representation of women in technical roles and building a pipeline for more Black leaders.

If you have any feedback, suggestions or questions, please share them with us. If you’d like to join us, find all the roles we’re hiring for on our careers page.