Liam Manoogian’s Post

A business delivering scale, growth and profitability. Impressive, indeed.

What's next for Monzo Bank to retain (and improve) this level of profitability? Is it entering a new market, seeking both geographic and product expansion. The UK market is very consolidated, a difficult market to break in. What are the countries and/or segment available for Monzo to break in? #financialservices #innovation #leadership

So I bank with Monzo Bank. And their rise to being a successful bank tells us a lot about disruptive brands. 1️⃣ Be Distinctive Separate yourself from the bunch and stand the f⚠️k out. Monzo manages this in communication, just check out their excellent social media game, and physically, in that you can tell a Monzo card from the other side of the room. 2️⃣ Meeting users where they are rather than where you think they should be Banking was clearly a building, a cash point, a badly made digital experience. Monzo being mobile-first in approach was a winning move, as the established banks were (and in some cases still are) a few years behind. 3️⃣ Solve user problems that are minutes, hours, or days in timeline, not weeks, months or years. I've been pitched a lot of ideas, and while an idea can be good, it is hard to get traction if the problem you are solving only delivers value in the long term. When I went to create a business account with Barclays, they gave me a massive form to fill out; I didn't get around to it. Monzo, on the other hand, in the app, just asked me for my name, my business name, and my company number, and I was up and running.

What a landmark year for Monzo Bank! We surpassed 9m personal customers and 400,000 business customers, launched game-changing new products, closed a ~£500m capital raise, delivered very robust and diversified revenues - with 2.5x growth! - and, as planned, reported our first year of profitability. I’ve never believed in the idea that a company has to choose between being either mission-oriented, or focused on business outcomes. FY2024 proved Monzo is doing both - and that our strategy of placing the customer at the heart of everything we do is working at scale. Over the past few weeks we’ve had many questions about our recent capital raise. What did investors see? What were they saying? They saw a business delivering scale, growth AND profitability. And alongside all of that - they saw the huge opportunity that is ahead of us, and the conviction that we can win it at scale. This is our biggest and best year yet and sets us up brilliantly for future success. https://https://lnkd.in/etf6T5A4

Monzo and Starling’s annual results are due in the next few weeks or so, so had a dig around in their financials and asked some people about how they’re doing for The Times. Ironically, they’ve had as much of a boost from rising rates as the big banks. Interestingly most of the feedback I got from analysts and investors was largely along the same lines: 1) Can they get more customers using them as their main account (they may need to start paying up for deposits on this) 2) Crucially, can they continue to grow, and manage, the lending side of the balance sheet. That remains a bit of an unanswered question, esp. when someone like Monzo a) Continues to make more money from transaction fees than loan interest and b) When it does lend, posts a pretty high £ of expected credit losses. Anyway, this is a subject I always love reporting on so please do take a read. https://lnkd.in/eRvnwpit

Programmable banking is the next logical step in the development of commercial #banking. The advent of programmable money in the form of digital assets and smart contracts has created a profound opportunity for the #tokenised economy, but accessing this potential today is difficult, expensive and thwart with friction. It's my firm conviction that programmable banking will become the principle means by which institutions will access #DApps and smart contracts on the #blockchain, directly through their programmable bank accounts. Watch this space as we're about to make so more announcements shortly. Until then 🤐

Monzo Bank are killing it on social at the moment. 🔥 No talk of interest rates, or deposit accounts, or loans, or any of the other really boring business functions of a bank that NOBODY is interested in while on social media. All of that stuff is great in store. Bank staff can sell me that to the moon with their perfectly pressed suits when I’m in branch, no problem. In fact that is the exact info I want to find out when I’m in that setting! But banks need to remove the suits and throw on the sweatpants on social and lighten up. 😎 Social media for a bank (and many other businesses) should be an awareness game over a selling game, and that’s where they all go so wrong. Monzo are disrupting the game, and it will be interesting to see the other traditional banks out there realize in the coming months and years that their online marketing approach needs to change. 💡 #monzo #monzobank #socialmediamanager #ugccreator #socialmediamarketing

🚨 𝙅𝙐𝙎𝙏 𝙄𝙉: Hundreds of employees of the digital bank Monzo Bank are being given the opportunity to sell part of their stakes in the company as its valuation soars to £𝟰.𝟱𝗯𝗻. Sky News has learnt that Monzo notified staff on Thursday that it was launching a secondary share sale backed by a number of the world's leading technology investors. Sources close to the deal said employees were likely to sell tens of millions of pounds-worth of stock as part of the deal, which is being launched less than three weeks before Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is expected to increase the rate of capital gains tax in her inaugural budget. Monzo, which has more than 10 million customers, has become one of Britain's most successful, and valuable, FinTech companies. It employs more than 3,700 people. Earlier this year, it raised more than £500m by selling newly issued shares to a group of investors led by Capital G, a division of Alphabet-owned Google: https://lnkd.in/dztmvN8F That primary share sale valued the business at £4.1bn. More info: https://lnkd.in/dTMvKNJm Find this helpful? [ 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘁 ] Anything to add about this subject? [𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁] Nice story, Marcel. Next! [ 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 ] 

A decade of Monzo and Starling: is it time to give them a try? It is ten years since the arrival of the digital banks Monzo and Starling. Their aim: to take on the big four of Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and NatWest. These newcomers had no branches or cash machines, they were phone-only, offering intuitive apps and colourful debit cards, and promising superior service. Customers flocked, but profits proved harder to come by. Monzo has never posted a profit and reported a £116.3m pre-tax loss in the year to February 2023. Starling’s first full year of profit was in the year to March 2022, when it reported a £32m pre-tax profit. Things are looking up, though. Starling followed up with another year of profit in 2023 and Monzo expects to be fully profitable this year, with annual results for both due in the next few weeks. So, after a decade, it seems as though these challenger banks are here to stay. We look at how they have shaken up an industry 👇

Props to Monzo Bank! 👏 This is Monzo’s first above-the-line campaign in five years and it delivers. Everyone talks about money, but we never talk about how money makes us feel. Monzo have flipped the switch on traditional Banking adverts (there are no horses galloping on the beach!) and has produced a dramatic, fast-paced film to show all the negative stresses, and the positive rewards, that money brings. I just love it! What do you think? #abovethelinemarketing #marketing #monzobank #innovation #disruptors https://lnkd.in/g35Zd9PS