For this edition of Founders’ Corner, we had the pleasure of speaking with TS Anil, CEO of Monzo. A leader in digital banking, celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, Monzo is revolutionizing the UK financial services industry by providing over 12 million customers with seamless, transparent, and intuitive tools to manage their money. Under TS’s leadership, Monzo continues to set the standard for innovation in banking, helping individuals and businesses achieve their financial goals while redefining what customers can expect from their bank.
The breakthrugh came from several factors working together. The market was ready – customers were dissatisfied with the incumbents – and we came to market with a completely new way of doing banking. Our first product, the current checking account, found a strong product-market fit in part because the onboarding was incredibly simple. You could open a Monzo account just using your mobile, and features like real-time notifications and instant balance updates were seen as magical. Something that continues to define us is incredible attention to design – the user journey and user experience at all points in time, but also the card. The hot coral card took off like a rocket and has taken on a life of its own. We had the initial ingredients of breaking through, enabled by a few key things, especially our tech stack.
We built out our tech stack in-house, which allowed us to iterate and do things that the incumbents could only dream of. Other fintech startups were building off of third-party stacks, so that became a differentiator very quickly. We were also really disciplined about finding the right way of connecting with our customers – tone of voice is crucial. We communicate with our customers in a way that makes things simple – not in ‘terms and conditions’. The mindset of the incumbent industry on new fees and price increases is to hope it goes quietly or that customers don’t notice. The way we introduced fee changes in 2021 was so wickedly transparent that there was no way you wouldn’t know a price was changing or how you would be charged. Customer sentiment was so supportive, and sign-ups went up! It speaks to the power of putting the customer and their needs first. The trust and credibility we built with customers is not just a nice-to-have – it’s essential to our ability to scale long term.
We felt that we needed to build our entire tech stack almost to a point of religion – we needed to control our own destiny. We wanted our platform to be able to do things that no off-the-shelf tech stack can do today and for our tech stack to be resilient way, way into the future. We built out for real scale and continue to add to it. It’s fully cloud-based and microservices-architected with over 2,500 microservices, so the ability to scale horizontally is enormous. We have over 3 billion platform events each day and deploy 200 software updates every day with zero downtime. It’s built for the long term, preparing us for hundreds of millions of customers.
This is a major differentiator for us and remains a differentiator as we work to build for needs in new markets. Banking and financial services are complicated industries, but we know what new modules we need to create. I’ve never seen a better banking tech stack than what we have at Monzo, and it gives us real optionality for the future in ways that are really exciting.
The low CAC and organic growth in the UK come from a maniacal focus on product-led growth. To us, Net Promoter Score (NPS) isn’t an abstract metric – we want people to actually promote us. We want to build viral loops into the product itself. Our brand is single-digit years old but has a color that everyone recognizes. Customers use our brand name as a verb, they say, “Monzo me the money.” It’s even made its way into hip-hop lyrics!
Europe is a natural next step for us. Its market dynamics are similar to the UK, with a handful of oligopolistic banks and a comparable regulatory framework. We’ve learned how to succeed in this environment and are confident we can replicate that success. We’re building out our European strategy with Ireland acting as our gateway to new markets.
The US is different and in many ways a lot more complex. But the fundamental reason we are excited about the US is that there is a huge gap, a huge need for an offering like Monzo’s. Our product helps people budget, spend, save, and invest, all in the same place. That product doesn’t exist in the US, and yet Americans are generally very anxious about money. The size of that opportunity in a market as big and dynamic as the US is incredibly exciting.
That said, we’re taking a disciplined approach: two product squads in the US are working on building the right product for the market. When we achieve high conviction in the product, we’ll scale up and invest in marketing. But we will not take a mediocre product and fuel it with CAC dollars.
Our mission is to make money work for everyone. This means building a way for customers to engage with their money, meet all their financial needs in a single place, and put them ahead in a way that the incumbent industry is not set up to do.
