I appreciate this thread could get out of control very quickly if we don’t all use good judgment and common sense but I think it’s appropriate considering a lot of us here are members of other Fintech communities.
Over the years since the Fintech revolution started in the UK a number of platforms have chosen to have communities one in particular shut theirs down (looking at you Starling ).
Monzo really don’t seem to give a crap about theirs any more (IMO) and it’s truly like the wild west
Revolut have basically made their unusable by screening every new user and topic
Dozens which does a fantastic job of engaging with their community and it remains largely niche and specific to their members.
Curve Not as bad a Monzo community but they don’t really seem to listen to the criticism they get on it.
Can anyone think of any more
I often wonder if Starling made a good decision to close their community and personally I think the Financial Product Enthusiasts are served much better by places like here where the conversation can be less specific.
Part of the issue I think that Monzo face with their community is that their customer service is so hit and miss people sign up to the community to get help and either get help or get piled on to. I myself am guilty of both sides but then their are those who constantly antagonise and seem to be immune for getting into trouble. Anyone that’s reported issues to the senior admins will know that typically you get nothing more than a copy/paste “Thanks, we’re aware there is an issue”.
By comparison I’ve never been able to get a single topic posted to Revolut because my posts never get approved… (they are not all stroppy )
I think this is a topic that can be discussed sensibly but I would strongly suggest than in responses you don’t name individuals as personal attacks aren’t necessary to discuss this topic that affects us all
I’ve said it several times, Starling absolutely made the right decision to shut down their forum. Most people will have by now forgotten about it except for those of us who did actually contribute to it when it was going. They’re concentrating on being a bank as they should without the distraction of any whinging and moaning on a public forum.
There’s a subReddit section on Starling if you’re interested.
Personally I think the reason Dozens works is because like here their members are very respectful of each of others opinions and points of view.
I too think that Starling made the right decision. A community whose purpose is customer service is a great thing the idea that we can all help each other out is being trialled by many big businesses. My company’s IT dept makes most support tickets public which allows other people to weigh in if they see something they’ve experienced.
I think the issue with the Monzo community (which to be fair I think is your main point) is that they don’t seem to know what it’s there for. Is it there for community, customer service or to engage customers for product development (the latter being something I think they’ve given up engaging their community on)
I think originally, it was an unlikely mix of all three which worked because the customer base was small and also (by its self-selecting nature) technically minded. This meant that the support angle was minimised to discussion of things like outages, not “how do I pay money into my account?” or other basic queries.
Over time, the users have become more diverse and more novices have sought out the forum for self help as the quality of Monzo’s support overall has declined. As you point out, at the same time, Monzo as a company grew beyond the startup phase and therefore took a step away from publicly sharing their plans. They have now started to find the balance more and have moved back towards publicly engaging with the community to an extent.
There is also a sense of community still, although it’s perhaps understandably less pronounced than it once was as the user base has grown.
I have some experience of engaging with Curve through their forum on things such as bug reports, and I’ve found that helpful. So it’s perhaps a bit unfair to say they don’t take the forum on board - I think they do.
I think smaller forums such as this one often have a better community aspect and that is nice, but a forum with lots of users is always going to be difficult to manage.
I’m sure I remember that time - although I was a lurker rather than a member back then. I used to check it now and again as a customer before I eventually decided to join.
I am sure I remember some good-natured trolling/joking on a long-running thread about Apple Pay support and whether or not it really was coming “fintech soon” or not!
I used to be that things would be flagged, so they would get hidden automatically in the topic thread.
Now they seem to silently move the “offensive” posts into a new hidden secret topic of removed posts. This is very bad for continuity of discussion and, as you say, often seems to be abused (not so much deliberately by the Coral Crew, more the massive flag brigade).
Personally I hardly ever flag a post, only a handful of times across all the forums I’ve used have I done it - and only whether it was either outright abuse or blatant spamming.
I feel this! With the trend now to close all threads relating to account issues, it riles me up when a moderator gets in too quick and closes it without being very helpful. It still baffles me how they don’t just tell folks how to find chat. That task more often than not befalls to one of us regular users. I feedback, flag, and message where I can, if it does any good.
Although I did reach out to Cookywook today to request he add those instructions to his original posts that gets referenced when those posts are closed, and he did! So hopefully that will help folks if the thread falls short of pointing them in the right direction. Small win.
I do think Monzo still care about the community and want it to work, no one just has the time to babysit it properly so it can prosper.
This annoys me so much that I have written to Alan about it specifically. There is nowhere you can talk about it in the forum without getting shutdown and when you do message them privately nothing comes from it.
I think this was evident when they did the survey for the Black Culture Celebration. After getting a lot of feedback they didn’t like the thread was closed and then they said that they had already made the decision before they asked the community
That was a low point, but I think many individual staff still do care about the forum, particularly if they actually joined and posted before they started working at Monzo. They know what it is like from the other side of the fence, and understand that many users really do care about the forum.
I don’t think Monzo intend to inflame the community, some things just sometimes come across poorly. It’s something they could work on, and hopefully they will.
I’ve engaged with staff there before and had a positive experience, and other staff who I haven’t personally engaged with have posted interesting and useful content recently. I think the real dark days of the forum were probably around 2 years ago, when it just seemed to be set adrift with little engagement at all.
It became pretty clear in hindsight that the topic was an obvious veiled attempt to emotionally manipulate the community into voting for the right icon, then it backfired spectacularly when we chose the wrong one. That was a rock bottom moment for me, given how recently it followed the controversial replacement of the pride icon with an icon inspired by the for-profit progress flag design.
They tried to make the community feel like they were heard without actually wanting to hear them. Very disheartening moment. I’m still not sure if the community is out of touch, or if Monzo is. But there’s definitely still a disconnected rift there IMO. I don’t like when companies get too involved with virtue signalling. Symbolism is all well and good, but you can’t be exclusionary about inclusion, and you need to handle those things tact. Apple gets that balance much better IMO, and if Monzo want to keep doing that stuff, they could learn a thing or two from Apple.
I’ll reign this in now as I fear we may be starting to verge off topic a little.
Have to say I don’t understand a lot of the flagging there.
It seems a collective few rule the roost and don’t seem to take another persons point of view.
By comparison what I am liking about this place is that we are trusted to self moderate (so far anyway). I think going a little off track is fine if it’s in context as we’ll get back eventually
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