Our social impact
We’re focused on four main areas in terms of our social impact:
Accessibility: how do we make sure that Monzo really works for everyone?
Vulnerable customers: how do we help customers in difficult situations stay in control of their finances?
Financial inclusion: how do we help as many people as possible get access to finance and make good financial decisions, particularly people who currently don’t have access to banking?
The environment: how do we make sure that we don’t have a negative impact on the planet?
Accessibility
We work hard to reduce the barriers people face, and make sure Monzo works for people with disabilities and those who’ve struggled with banking in the past.
Highlights
- We’ve partnered with RAD & Signly to understand how the deaf community experience banking and the problems they encounter, and now we’re testing an idea to make key pages in our blog and website accessible in both audio and sign!
- We’re working with the Digital Accessibility Centreto assess monzo.com against web content accessibility guidelines.
We're working on more inclusive formats: you can now listen to our audio terms and conditions and read about inclusive language in our tone of voice guidance.
What's next? We're testing our current sign up journey for customers with different access needs.
Vulnerable customers
At Monzo we have a particular focus on helping our customers who face the most challenging circumstances.
Highlights
- We're continuing to raise awareness of our gambling block, so that those who need it know it's there. We're also doing research to understand how effective it is as a method of self exclusion for customers.
- Money and mental health go hand in hand, so we're making it easy for customers share personal circumstances with us if they're having an impact on finances.
- There's a link between financial capability and confidence with numbers, so we partner with National Numeracy to empower society to understand and improve their finances.
What's next? We're building more tools to support customers and measuring our support for customers facing mental health conditions. We want to work closely with the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute to assess ourselves against the various standards they set for the industry.
Financial Inclusion
1.3 million people in the UK don't have access to a bank account. Lone parents, migrants and people living with a long-term illness are especially vulnerable groups. We want everyone who wants one to have access to a Monzo bank account, along with information to help them make good financial decisions.
Highlights
- We worked on a pilot to help Big Issue sellers make more money (and sell copies via monzo.me)
- Our Banking For All campaign
What's next?
We’ll support charities and organisations to deliver financial education in socially excluded communities. We'll do more work with the Big Issue and explore how we accept a broader range of IDs at sign up.
The environment
Although we're a branchless digital bank our operations still contribute to global climate change. So it's our responsibility to minimise carbon emissions and take care of our planet.
We focus on 4 areas for improvement: card production and delivery, our offices, employee travel and the energy used to power our servers.
Here’s what we're doing to minimise our impact:
Our servers are carbon neutral! They’re hosted in an AWS facility plant in Dublin, and all the non-renewable energy used by our servers gets offset by Amazon.
The packaging for our cards is fully recyclable.
Our offices in Cardiff and London both do Environmentally Preferred Purchasing (EPP), so our washrooms are stocked with animal friendly and organic products.
- All UK monzonauts can be part of the Cycle to Work scheme, so it’s more convenient to use environmentally friendly transport for their commute. Our Cardiff office has also committed to the Business Healthy Travel Charter Wales.