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Comment by emdowling | Hacker News Reader

Good on them. It's an outstanding product and they are iterating very quickly on it. The app UX is starting to feel like it's bursting at the seams - they've added in loans, and overdrafts, and savings pots, and international transfers and no doubt more is to come.

I hope they take the time now to streamline their UX. A mobile-first bank is an outstanding idea and Monzo have been the best to execute on it, but avoiding bloat and maintaining speed and simplicity will be one of their biggest product challenges.

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By far my favourite thing about Monzo is that the Android app is FAST. My old fashioned bank's mobile app is so slow and difficult use that I do almost everything with Monzo instead. If their app becomes bloated and slow, I'll be looking for one of the many other mobile first banks to switch to as there is really not much to distinguish them.

Totally agree on the app UI front - I'm hoping they live up to their promise of being a hub for lots of types of accounts, but that requires a substantial rethink of their UI, which is still very focussed on one primary account with 'pots' (accounts without an exposed account no), and as you say has many new features tacked on. The UI is not bad IMO, but it'd be nice to see it streamlined a bit. To be fair they have done a bit of that (the payments screen has been improving).

Another ad for the YC school of doing these things

> ...I’m a follower of Paul Graham and the YC camp of startup wisdom... http://tomblomfield.com/day/2015/12/13

From the CEO/co founder, GoCardless (YC S11) alum

> ... maintaining speed ...

Sorry I know this is not the point of your comment, but I couldn't let this go: the Monzo app is by far the slowest app on my phone. Until their more recent updates it was nearly unusable on an iPhone SE. Still has >1sec response times on almost any touch event. (comments on the forum suggest this is because they use O(N) algorithms somewhere, and after 2y worth of events the app slows to a crawl. doesn't inspire confidence, to be honest.)

To the point that I focus on putting as many spends as possible on another card that has a better app, just so I can avoid spending any time in Monzo.

To end on a positive note: their support is so much better than the competition it isn't even funny. Apparently they are the only bank with a "brain required" policy for CS.

Apparently their Android app has better performance and they're working to fix this on iOS:

https://monzo.com/blog/2018/09/18/ios-app-performance/

I just loaded up the android app for the first time after booting. 5 seconds before I could see balance, another 15 seconds before the graph loaded. It used to be fast, but I hardly use it any more because it's slow to check my balance.

I am on Android, and for me it used to be slow, but recently has become very fast again. I just opened the app and it took <=1 second to get to see my balance. I am on a very new phone though (oneplus6), and I don't know enough about how different hardware affects speed.

That said, since I changed some settings to reduce battery/data usage, the notifications for spending often don't turn up for several minutes, where they used to be instant (before being able to put my card back into my wallet).

If you're looking for customer support, I really recommend First Direct, their phone support is completely unreal, 1 ring and you're through to someone that can service any banking need you might have with them, no transfers, no waiting, no fiddly security it works really well!

Their app has come a long way recently too.

I have first direct as well, and it’s a joke. They are stuck in the last century. My 1Password entry for them holds eight security codes for different occasions (phone, bank, “code signing”, whatever weird jargon they came up with now). Who is their target audience , Kim Peek?

They treat me with the same disdain on the phone that any other bank does , for example when they contradict themselves but blame me for it.

Everything is great until you go off script, and the mask falls. Not so with Monzo. At all.

If you want to be treated like a human being by a UK bank, Monzo is your only choice.

Or get rich, I’ve heard that helps. I’m trying that one, and will keep you posted. ;)

We're definitely aware of the iOS performance issues and we're working to fix them. We're frustrated by it too.

1sec response times on almost any touch event. (comments on the forum suggest this is because they use O(N) algorithms somewhere, and after 2y worth of events the app slows to a crawl. doesn't inspire confidence, to be honest.)

This is not my experience on a few different iOS devices over the years - things respond pretty much instantly (iPhone 6 and 8), never seen 1 second waits. There's something wrong with it on your phone (not sure what, and that is an old model), but that is not the experience on a newer phone. I have a few years of transactions in there, was an early user so it's not that either. Perhaps SE particularly suffers though and it's just masked because I have a faster device.

I do hope their friendly support can cope with their growth, I agree it's one of the best bits of the customer experience.

My one complaint, and the thing which forces me to use a competitor instead, is that there's no pin protection on entering the app, which I find quite unbelievable.

Weird. They have fingerprint authentication to access the app on Android but not pin.

It's a configurable setting. For some, I imagine, having to unlock the phone, then the app with the same fingerprint credential seems pointless.

You can certainly turn on Face ID (and thus I assume Touch ID and passcode authentication too).

Personally I love that this is optional; I already authenticate securely with my phone, so it seems weird to mandatorily require an additional authentication step.

Optional is fine, I'm not looking to force anything on anyone else, but as an Android user without a fingerprint reader, there's no option.

Oh right, sorry. I didn’t consider that use case! Definitely seems like that option should be available.

It sucks. Just to provide a bit of background on these kind of decisions: usually it's quite hard to support a plenitude of platforms, so what happens is that you end up supporting the most recent ones first: the ones that have strong authentication baked into the OS.

I can speak from experience about user perception of security, having previously run security product for a major UK fintech (which works with Monzo). A large proportion of users would complain that biometrics and/or PIN was not mandatory when opening the app. Many people share devices, especially iPads, or have family members that know their device passcode (or have a registered fingerprint or face).

Making it mandatory (or strongly pushing it) greatly increases the level of trust people have in your company. The data suggests it is a worthwhile convenience trade-off.

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