I assume the month long free offered trial of Monzo Plus I have just been give is just as they say, just a trial that will not persist unless you actively retain it. When Bunq had an offer like this, you actively had to unsubscribe, which - quelle surprise - you had to do via chat where, of course, they tried to convince you they were worth €8 a month. Outside of banking, this is remarkably common, and frankly should be made illegal, but that’s for another thread.
There’s nothing in the Monzo Plus offer that I desperately need, so I am wondering what the rationale behind this is to offer it to non-subscribers. To be totally honest, I’m wary of using the “Plus” features incase they assume I want to subscribe. I’m assuming they aren’t offering the 1% interest for the free month
It states quite clearly that it’s a limited trial which will end automatically and you won’t be charged for it. You can also cancel it immediately if you’re not interested.
There’s large thread on the Monzo forum about this - many Monzo users were not happy. I just cancelled it straight away.
Just reverted to the normal account after a month with a few irritating emails suggesting I wouldn’t want to lose the “benefits”, none of which I’d been bothered to use during the trial anyway
To give you an opportunity to explore the features of it free. Forcing you into it is quite clever in that regard, as it’s easy for apathetic folks to ignore free trials.
The intention will be you’ll try the features, like them enough to keep it, or miss them when they’re gone that you subscribe.
Might not work on you, but I have a feeling this will be quite an effective campaign for Plus.
This was quite the thread on the other place, a wide gamut of opinion.
Personally - I didn’t really want it, but since it was free and there was no pressure to continue with it at the end, I don’t think it was all that bad. I do think they should’ve given users the option however.
In fairness to Monzo - they’re just doing what a number of companies do and play on behavioural marketing and loss aversion. In that if you have something, then don’t you’ll want it more than if you never had it in the first place.
I think the rationale is simple really - offer it to dormant users in the hope that a) they go back to Monzo and b) they signup to plus and see benefit from it.
I just leafed through the Monzo debate forum. Quite the range of opinion there. I personally thing £5 a month for quite a lot of things that are free elsewhere will not actually yield them much in the way of additional custom. I use my Monzo card frequently, and there was nothing there that would tempt me to upgrade.
None of what I say is meant to come across as inflammatory…but
But Monzo has an audience of customers willing to pay that monthly fee anyway, so are they really bothered about what a customer thinks?
But do they? Why should they care? they’re a business at the end of the day. Monzo it would appear have quite the customer base allegedly, several million customers if the figures are to be believed.
Look at Starling’s pathetic in credit interest offering, it positively borders on pointless imo and I’m still a customer, just! The only difference I guess is that Starling don’t charge a fee, but then there’s no ridiculous metal cards etc on offer that I’m aware of.
At the end of the day, it’s all about choices and putting your hard earned cash where you think is best. We all need to remember though, banks are businesses and they’re there ultimately to make money out of their customers.
You need to have an urge to go exploring the app to make this work. I’ve linked a couple of credit cards but you don’t really see them from the feed screen without scrolling sideways, so they’re easily forgotten. How excited will the average person be about seeing their credit card balance in mozo? Will they bother?
Likewise, I know I could set up a virtual card but I have no real inclination, especially knowing it will stop working soon. And it’s the same with google sheets export - I won’t waste time setting it up for 30 days use.
Because of this, Plus is a bit of an odd product to force on to users. My guess is that most will do nothing with the extra features, and carry on using the app the way they always have.
Overall, it’s probably a low cost initiative, so may still be favourable for monzo, but I don’t predict much of an uptake.
That’s an Apples to Oranges comparison. Premium bonds isn’t a current account.
I don’t subscribe to Plus but I can see the attraction of the interest perk. My current account balance will typically always be above £1k (regardless of whether or not I subscribe to Plus). So earning a bit of interest on that money if I did decide to subscribe to Plus would be an appreciated perk which would reduce the net cost without me doing anything different.
Plus is designed to make them money. If they increase the interest rate, they would have to either reduce the amount the interest is paid on commensurately or increase the £5 fee.
The net cost of Plus iirc is around £3-£4 if you keep enough money in the account, if they put the interest rate up I bet the net cost would be the same.
That’s only if you have nothing in your current account or standard pots. So £500 in your current account would attract 1% on plus and the 3% savings pot would get 4% on the first £1500 and 3% on the rest.
At this stage, the account aggregator. I’m not aware of any other bank app that offers anything like this level of integration and analytics.
Other than that, nothing really. Everything else is free elsewhere if supported.
In terms of other “premium” accounts, Premium is reasonably well aligned to other packaged accounts, but less aligned to other premium offerings which work on the basis of financial eligibility and therefore give you some of these things for free.
