Also I love the level of openness. No other bank would do this. (If you're in the UK, Monzo is honestly amazing. I've cancelled all my other bank accounts.)
We try to make the posts accessible to our customers as well as engineers :)
Totally agree! I don't have a Monzo account yet, but I find this level of transparency extremely appealing. I know people who work for a few "traditional" banks (RBS, Santander, Lloyd's), and by all accounts the IT setup is an absolute shit-show. I can kind of understand though; they've been around so long that they have a ton* of tech debt and legacy crap to deal with.
* it's great that Monzo are innovating on the IT side, but to woo me they are going to have to do better on the business side - I want a better interest rate for my personal current account, savings accounts and cash ISAs; I want stocks & shares ISAs, with low fees; I want a better interest rate for my business account, along with support for international payments (every traditional bank handles these, even if they do take ~1.8% in interchange fees... grrr).
Also, other banks have the same kinds of outages, often, but are not as transparent or communicative as Monzo.
I've been full Monzo for the last 18 months and have never had an issue.
One of the unexpected advantages (if you can call it that) of OpenBanking integrations is that you get to see, in practice, just how often the high-street banks have problems. Or how long it takes for them to recover. Whatever has been said about politics and sausages sure applies...
I mean, good grief. Payment handling for a given bank may be down for a week and that's apparently not a cause for concern. Authorisation messages may be missing for days. Incoming queue can be offline for two days and customers just have to deal with it.
From the stats I've seen, Monzo is actually among the best performers with their reliability and recovery. (A recurring complaint on the receiving end is that their app makes it really easy to generate payments outside of the OpenBanking flow. That has generated extra work for our payment and customer service teams.)
Their outages haven't affected me at all yet - I don't think any have lasted for days.
I have a Monzo account as well and really like them, but it doesn't have an IBAN and can't accept international transfers (at least not officially and reliably). That makes it not really usable as a sole bank account for many of us.