Making Friends With... Monzo

Welcome to another episode of “Making Friends With…” - a special series where the Tech for Good Live team sit down for an in-depth interview with someone who is doing exceptional work in the tech industry.

In this episode, Bex is chatting with some of the good people at Monzo, the online bank that has been shaking up the banking industry over the last 5 years.

Her guests are Jessica Bilcock, Public Policy and Vulnerability Manager, and Natalie Ledward, Head of Vulnerable Customers.

They discuss the challenges banks face with vulnerable customers and what Monzo are doing to help with the growing issue of problem gambling in the UK.

Transcript

Intro: Hello. Welcome to an episode of Tech For Good Live Making Friends With. This is a bit different to our regular weekly show. Some of our team are going to sit down and chat with people who have good stories to tell. Hopefully, by the end of it, we'll even make a few friends. We need to because we're all desperately lonely.

Bex: Hi, I'm Becky Evans and welcome to Making Friends With. Today we're talking to two people from Monzo. We've got Public Policy and Vulnerability Manager, Jessica Bilcock, and also Head of Vulnerable Customers, Natalie Ledward. I'm really looking forward to talking to them about the work that they're doing around gambling. Let's get stuck in. [music plays] Thank you for joining me, Jessica and Natalie from Monzo. I really really appreciate you joining us because we often talk about Monzo and how great it is. So, thanks for having a chat with me today.

Natalie: Thanks for having us.

Bex: No, thanks for coming and I just wanted to ask you really you both have really cool job titles that you don't hear that often. Well, I don't anyway. And so I wondered if you could both just tell me what it is you do as part of those cool job titles. Jessica, do you want to go first.

Jessica: Yeah, sure. Um, so, Hi, I'm Jess and I sit in the Public Policy and Vulnerability team in Monzo. I say team; there are about two, three of us total and we're kind of responsible for building our relationships with policymakers, consumer groups, nonprofits, other fintechs to feed into essentially emerging policy issues in the UK, whether that be sort of new legislation, enew guidance, new standards for industry that kind of thing. We have a team like this, basically because our mission is huge. So Monzo, we're on a mission to make money work for everyone and we just can't achieve that in a vacuum. Policy and regulation play a huge part of that. So they hire people like me to basically try and help shape regulation to make sure that super fast growing businesses like us can scale and essentially that we can build those better solutions for consumers really. The one quirk that I probably would point out is that the Public Policy team in Monzo does sit with the Vulnerability team, which I think is just really reflective of our priorities as a business, and really what we do day to day as well.

Bex: It sounds like a lot that you’re doing there but I love it. It sounds great and I didn't really know that that was Monzo’s mission. I feel it. I definitely feel that from the outputs of Monzo but yeah it wasn't something that I feel like Monzo shoves down your throat a lot. You’re just kind of getting on with it in the background. which seems cool. All right, Natalie, do you want to tell me about Head of Vulnerable Customers? I love this job title. It’s brill. 

Natalie: Yeah, sure. I am Natalie. I'm the Head of Vulnerable Customers at Monzo and like Jess said, we kind of fit together as a function with public policy. So it's really my role to look at both the internal and external advocacy, I guess, of any of our customers that have any sort of additional support needs. So I work along the public policy team but also work with customer service, product, communications, marketing, basically anytime where we may be impacting our customers, that's kind of the scope of what I do. So it's really interesting job, and it’s like Jess said, it’s really kind of embedded into our mission at our Monzo to make money work for everyone and we really can't make money work for everyone without considering everyone. Sso really we had to kind of consider, and really understand the needs of all customers and that like I said includes anybody that might have additional needs, anybody who's facing challenges, whether it's their circumstances in life, health conditions, job loss. You know we've really seen this come into play in the last year with the pandemic. So it's important to us to make sure that we're supporting customers from all angles there.

Bex: Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, how has the pandemic changed how you working at Monzo?

Natalie: Yeah, I mean, we've had a busy year, to say the least. I think we'll start there, but you know we're lucky in that it really didn't change how we work today, You know, I've worked remotely for Monzo for three and a half years now so we were really set up to continue as normal in terms of, you know, delivering customer support and making sure that we're there. We didn't really miss a step with that. But the types of conversations that we're seeing now, we've just seen a real increase in, you know, resilience from customers. Customers are struggling with their money. And also I think everybody's feeling, you know the effects, the toll on the mental health and that goes for the staff wellbeing of our team. And also, you know, the customers themselves they're definitely, you know, feeling the effects of the last year. I'm sure everyone can relate to that. 

Jessica: Yeah, I think in some ways, to be honest, we had it maybe easier than other banks or other sort of non-tech-based companies because we were already digital and we already had those kinds of structures set up that Natalie was talking about to help them support people. We didn't have to sort of build them  in response when people could start coming into branches and things like that. So in some ways we've been lucky but yeah, yeah it's definitely been a challenge.

Bex: You've talked about all the types of customers that you consider vulnerable and we're going to talk about gambling a little bit more in a minute but what sorts of things do you do then to help those vulnerable customers? What does it look like? How does it play out in Monzo?

Natalie: Yeah, so we've been really lucky actually in that, you know. When Monzo was set up, it was founded in 2017, founded in 2015, and we got our banking license in 2017 and really from the beginning, the consideration of a vulnerable customer function has always been there. So I joined in 2017 and I've spent the last three and a half years working with a really small team to set that up. We've been really, really lucky in that the FCA has been publishing guidance in the last few years to really help firms shape their approach to vulnerable customers so we very much are aligned to the FCA guidance on how firms should treat vulnerable customers. And when we use that definition: the definition is someone who due to their personal circumstances is especially susceptible to detriment, particularly when a firm is not acting with the appropriate levels of care. So it's a super broad definition and we don't really have a defined checklist of what makes someone vulnerable at Monzo. We're all kind of potentially vulnerable at some point in our lives. Everybody goes through experiences that can impact their finances. Whether that's, you know, health. It can be a life event, like a bereavement, a divorce, a job loss, it can be capability, it can be digital skills. Jess said, you know, we're a digital bank and we've been really lucky in that we've been set up in that way. That does cause barriers though so we need to really make sure we’re considering digital literacy, sort of numeracy skills, literacy skills and making sure that our customers are understanding communications from us, etc. And I think that the kind of interesting part for me is, at the end of that definition, when a firm is not acting with appropriate levels of care that's really what our team is here for. We're here for that appropriate level of care. We're here to kind of respond and react to customers. We're here to make sure that the product is designed so that it's there to use and it does make money work for everyone, there's visibility and control over finances and, and hopefully customers don't really need to tell us about their circumstances because the product just works for them. But when they do, if they are finding it difficult, then we have a team of specialists who are here for them.

Bex: Thanks, Natalie, that's really interesting, especially what you said about digital literacy. So I work a lot in the digital literacy space and I also work with charities to help them build digital products and obviously, especially at the community end, there's a lot of organisations through lockdown and COVID have been saying we can't reach our customers or the people we need to support. We can't reach them anymore. We know we need to go digital to reach them but loads of people can't even access digitally, so what do we do about that? And I think it's quite an interesting challenge because yeah digital can be a massive enabler for the people who can't get around and can't get into branches and you know that's gonna be really helpful for those people who struggle with that sort of thing. And the same with the charity tech that I've been building, can be a real enabler for those who maybe couldn't have accessed face to face services before. But then you've got the other flip side of it is it's also sometimes a barrier for people who struggle with digital literacy. I was in the post office the other day and I've not really told this story publicly but I really want to because there was this old man, maybe in his 80s, maybe even older, and he went up and he said I need to pay my TV licence. Can I pay that here? And the woman, and bless her like I have a lot of empathy for her because she probably wasn't expecting this to come up today. She was like, no, that's online, we've not done TV licences at the post office for a while now. And he was like, well, I can't access the internet, how am I supposed to pay it? And he wasn't being angry with her. He was clearly frustrated with not being able to pay the TV licence. And she was like, well, we're not done it for ages, so, how did you, how have you been paying it? And I was like, oh no, don't ask that, because clearly like at that point I just knew what was happening. I was like his wife died right, right, she was paying it. And it was, he went well, they’re dead. I was like, oh no, and then she obviously got really flustered and was like, well, maybe you should’ve sorted that out with them before. He was like, why, I didn't know they were gonna die. And I was like what is happening in this conversation. And it was all very horrible and no one enjoyed it and I had to step in and get him a phone number that I'd found on the internet, and I had a chat to her and she was like, well, it's his fault if he can't pay it. There is a way to pay it. It’s his fault. But she was flustered by that point. I have a lot of empathy for her, you know, I think that that should have been taken into consideration and maybe it was, but now it's three years later and nobody's thinking about it anymore but like where was the offline leaflet that they could have given him to say here's how. I don't know. I felt like nobody had thought about this poor guy. Nobody trained her that this might be something that happened. Nobody had done anything about this poor man that can't pay his TV licence. So like thinking about that customer, that feels to me like the vulnerable customer we're thinking about and like, yeah, what is the challenge of what about people who can't access online services? I don’t think anybody's got that right, have they?

Natalie: No, absolutely not. And, you know, I think it's important for me to kind of say, vulnerable customers aren't this abstract group.  It’s really an industry term right, vulnerable customers. But vulnerable customers, it's me. It's me when I've broken my arm and I actually can't use my phone because I can't type left-handed or it's my grandparents who, you know, are really unconfident with using a smartphone. And it's our parents, it's our children. We really need to be designing products that work for everyone. And, you know, we've got a long journey with that. We've been around this bank for three years and so we are really on this big mission and it's a long one, but it's just worth knowing that there is considerations there, inside Mongo bank and we really are trying to kind of understand the barriers that, not just to Monzo but the barriers that people have faced in the past to financial services. We do events called listening events which we launched in 2019. The pandemic gave them a bit of a hit. They were physical events that we used to run in the office and we did a bit of a roadshow of them and we're really looking forward to this year to picking these events back up. But for us, the listening events, we'd invite groups of people into the office or into an event space and we'd really just be asking them questions about what barriers they face to financial services. We tried to focus these groups. So we did one with the deaf community at the start of 2020. We've done one with the refugee community in Lewisham, which was quite local to the office. We really just wanted to understand what barriers are there, and really how we can address them, whether it's a customer service thing, whether it's a product thing. There's so much work to do and this is why we kind of joined forces with the Public Policy team because a lot of this stuff, it's not our power as Monzo Bank to change. It is really a much wider issue and I think that's the kind of interesting thing about the team that we work in, is we've really got the power to change that external landscape and try and influence those barriers and bring them down.

Jessica: I mean I only joined Monzo probably about four or five months ago now, and I remember because it sticks out. Natalie and I were having a really a conversation about these listening events and how it kind of feeds into how Monzo prioritises on what we build. And, you know, it's true that some of these barriers are huge. It’s true that, you know, you need a Public Policy team or you need people dedicated to engaging with the whole industry to move some of these conversations forward. Like we're doing with the gambling work. But some of these things are surprisingly obvious once you start listening to people. The one that always sticks out to me is, we did a listening event with the Royal Association for Deaf People and it’s so blindingly obvious when someone says it but we ended up deciding to change our onboarding flows and result to allow people to sort of say or sign the statement that you have to say, you know, hi I'm Jess and I'd like a Monzo account. And this is essentially because for a lot of deaf people, English isn't their first language. Sign language is. And I remember and that always stuck with me because sometimes these things are so small and so blindingly obvious to the groups that it impacts but just not to the rest of us. So it's really important to have that kind of baked in, and I found it really, really interesting when I first joined.

Bex: I love the idea of these listening events. i have been talking quite a lot about diversity and inclusion lately because of another project I'm working on and we're all learning all the time, aren't we. I think, you know, I've been working with a blind colleague lately. Hi Cristiana, she's our editor. And so like I feel like I've become much more aware of her needs in a workspace, and was kind of talking about this issue that had come up about videos on Zoom and while I was talking to that person, they were like, well I’m hard of hearing. So although that might help your blind colleague, that would not help me, as somebody who's deaf, I need to be able to lipread and I'm like, yeah of course. And it's not really until you start speaking to people who have those issues firsthand,that you really start to understand how it all plays out and how complicated it all is. I love that you're doing that. I love listening events.

Natalie: Yeah. It's really really important for us to involve our customers. It has always been. We set up Monzo and we set up the community forum and, you know, we had like the vote on the community forum when we were changing our name from Mondo to Monzo. So we've really tried to involve customers in all of our decisions. But I think it's become more important now that we've kind of reached this point where we're not supporting thousands of customers, we're supporting millions. And that's really important to kind of make sure that we're really hearing all of the different voices that are in that pool of customers and I think it's just as important, you mentioned diversity and inclusion, you know, to have a representative workforce as well as have a diverse workforce that represents that customer base. Because otherwise you miss those obvious cues. You miss the things that, you know, the person next to you might be impacted by but if you don't have them then you know,  you're not making money work for everyone. Let's go back to that. You've really not. 

Bex: And I love what you've been saying as well about the policy. I suppose I've never thought about it like that before. Like for me, as somebody builds digital products a lot, I think of vulnerable customers and I think of user journeys and long term impact and, you know, accessibility, but of course, in your space where you're very heavily regulated, of course, policy needs to change before you can do anything about it and I love that you're like, instead of going, nah, we can't do anything about that, we've done what we can and now we're gonna stop because, you know, policy says something different. But instead, you've got the public policy part of your job, Jessica, which is completely a part of everything that you're doing and it matters, so I love that. 

Jessica: Yeah, I mean, we all are really lucky in the UK. We have sort of one of the best environments to sort of grow and scale fintech, which obviously helps with financial inclusion, massively. But yeah, it's absolutely true and sometimes there are their blockers or sometimes there's a lack of a framework. For example, if you're looking at things like open data, that really could have some huge impacts on helping people either manage their finances or access the right tools for them to sort of go about their day to day life. Sometimes it's a lack of a framework. Sometimes, you know, we'll be pushing for more regulation in space. Quite often, to be honest, we'll be pushing for more regulation in space to try and pull the industry along with us or you know, establish this new kind of bars. So yeah, it really is exciting. It's the other side to the coin.  But I think what's really important and it's the thing that Monzo does well in my opinion, as someone being very new and being the outsider is, you can't just sort of get on a soapbox and decide this is absolutely what we should be doing, from the top down. You really have to walk that walk first and that's why it's something that I believe Monzo does really well, is listening to the customers, deciding how to build something, shaping those features and then saying okay, so should we scale this across industries? Should this be a new standard? Should we help other people build this? And I think that's what's so exciting and fun about my job. It’s getting to sort of be at the end of that process almost. It actually makes it very easy, I won’t lie.

Bex: You mentioned fintech there and I think fintech sometimes gets a bad rep. I know there's loads of people doing really great space and fintech as well so there are loads of positive stories coming out of it and on this podcast ,we love to tear things apart and be really negative about stuff. It's more fun, isn't it, having a go at things. So we do that quite a lot and fintech sometimes comes up, but it comes up just as much positively as generally. There's a lot of people doing good work in the space, but I suppose the bits where it has a bad rep, I don't know if you've come across anything or what you think about the fintech space more generally. I definitely get such a positive vibe from Monzo but yeah I don't know if you've had any like, what you think about fintech generally? 

Natalie: I’ll let you answer that Jess [laughs]

Jessica: [laughs] Generally speaking honestly, I think from my perspective, having the kind of fintech ecosystem that we do in London and that we do in the UK is a net positive for consumers. Monzo have been able to scale but there are new firms that occupy huge niches that really do kind of help people, whether that's driving down costs or making it easier to sort of control and access your finances. All of this stuff that maybe wouldn't have happened without that competition. 

Bex: Yeah. 

Jessica: So I really do think there's a lot to be said for that. Obviously, I think there is a danger and I think it's really reasonable to say that there's quite often sort of fintech is thrown around as a buzzword in relation to financial inclusion without actually delivering anything concrete. And I think that's a reasonable criticism but I don't think that it’s always the case. You know we can talk about this later but you know, even some of the smaller work that we've done recently on gambling and using these new technologies and are really great grasping open banking and using the visibility that that can give you to try and build something that can help users that are struggling. I think that does demonstrate that tech can do good and does do good. So I wouldn't necessarily be as skeptical perhaps as some of you but maybe I should, maybe I should be. I don't know. 

Bex: Maybe not. I think it's just me. Maybe it's a perception, isn't it? Like you think of tech and tech traditionally you think of those tech pros sitting upstairs high fiving on their scooters, like, trying to just make as much profit and turn around the business and sell it and that's what you think of when you think of tech pros.  I think similarly with finance pros, only with less of the scooters and more suits, and I think I have this idea in my mind of like finance pros and tech pros smashing together and it's like the worst person I could possibly have [laughs]. But yeah, I think that's just where my head goes. 

Natalie: I've been having a lot of conversations around this new guidance recently and vulnerable customers and one of the things that comes up quite a lot, and it always surprises me, but it means that we're in a really privileged and lucky position at Monzo. And I think this is what fintech has helped with. You know, traditional banks have had this bad reputation right and I think the number one thing that customers don't have in banks is trust. And I think one thing that fintech has done is kind of maybe moved a little bit along or progressed it and I do feel like we're really lucky in that we've really got our customers’ trust. They trust us. Which means that we're in a really great position to be able to offer these tools to help them and I'm not sure that with the more traditional banks, customers would be as readily accepting of the newer tools. Because of this trust thing so I think that that's an interesting sort of perspective, just from the last few weeks from me talking to other banks and having these really forward-thinking conversations about wow what can we do. All these tools that we can offer our customers. Can we offer them a safe space to disclose their needs to us and the thing that falls down for the bigger banks is the trust. Why would a customer share that with us? What are we gonna do with that information? And I think fintech will push that forward a little bit and hopefully rebuild trust for people again in banks. That’s my perspective on it anyway. I'd like to think that.

Bex: No. I love that and I love to hear that banks are working together on that sort of thing. I think that's really, really great to hear. I didn't know that was happening.

Natalie: Oh yeah, like, yeah. We've said it a lot at Monzo and I do think this is true. You know, supporting vulnerable people it’s not about competition.We don't want this to be like a competitive edge to our brand or anything. This is just important for everyone and it's really embedded into the campaign that, you know, I'm sure Jess is going to share details on shortly, but we really want everybody in the banking industry to be working together on this and really trying to lift everyone's experience. And that is the case. There's some really great work being done by the other banks in this area and we do try and share that with each other.

Bex: That's music to my ears. I do love that collaboration. It's like my favourite thing ever. So, thank you for pushing that agenda forward. It was so funny this morning. I went on a walk in the hills with my husband and we were chatting about all this stuff and Monzo came up. I’d forgotten I was talking to you today. We were chatting about Monzo, about how great the trust-building was right at the beginning. So we were talking about the idea of invite-only and how actually now it's like, I didn't believe the invite-only stuff with Clubhouse, so I totally just was whatever and signed up anyway and they let me in anyway and I was like I didn't need an invite. We were talking about how you, kind of like with a first big invite only sort of thing, we were both like, that was real and we remember both really wanting to get a Monzo invite. But then we were talking about how actually it was about building trust, it's a finance product. It's a new way of doing things. You absolutely had to build trust. So the trust was there. I think it said ,like we were talking about how, you know, there's so many people in front of you, and you're like, oh yeah so there are hundreds of people already using this and there’s thousands of people already using this. So it built up that trust right from the start and I know that's not like a tech for good thing, but it’s interesting that you're talking about trust now and I was just talking about that this morning. I love the way that you did that.

Natalie: That was definitely, yeah, like credit to our amazing marketing team, who were only one or two people at that time. But yeah, like we had that queue and the golden tickets as well I think really helped. It was really genuinely word of mouth that was spreading Munzo at that time. Everybody wanted a golden ticket to pass to their friend. When I first started working at Monzo, that was one of the biggest requests that was coming through from customer support, was can I have more golden tickets.  

Bex: [laughs]

Natalie: So people really wanted to share it with their friends, which was obviously great for us, but you know you trust what your friends are using right? Like, you trust your friend's recommendation.

Jessica: And actually it's still, still to this day, pretty much the biggest sort of customer acquisition channel that we have. I think it is the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of our growth is still word of mouth, which is actually to me quite insane because, obviously, last week we hit 5 million customers and I think we grow by about 100,000 customers a month at this point. And I think, you know, no one would tell me off for saying that about 90, 95% of that is still word of mouth, which is incredible for sort of the size and scale. But I think you're right. It goes back to trust. If your friends use it, you'll use it because it's your money. You don't really want to take a risk. 

Bex: And I think and I can't believe as well that it's only been five or six years. Like, obviously I still think of Monzo as being kind of like new and innovative and at the forefront of stuff but at the same time, I also think of it as always being around. And like, if you think about how the landscape has changed as well since you set up. All the other banks that are now replicating the model and how you've pushed the industry forward so much. Iit's massive.

Natalie: It's been a while to say the least. But yeah, I think we're in a great position now. Especially after last year and the challenges that we faced last year, just as a business but also, you know the entire country was facing those same problems. It really felt like, you know, this community feeling didn't it? That we were all going through something together. But, you know, we're really proud of all of the work that we did last year and proud of where we're at today.

Bex: Anyway, back to tech for good. I was just getting excited about talking to you about all of this. But the reason why we're chatting is that you emailed me Jess, about the gambling work that you’ve been doing, which we've known about for a while at Tech for Good Live. You talked at an event a while back and it’s something that we bring up a lot. Any time we see it in the news, it's something that we talk about on the podcast. So yeah, there's been a bit of a new, new campaign that you're running. Do you want to tell me a little bit more about it?

Jessica: Yeah, absolutely. So, as you probably already know, the government are actually currently reviewing the gambling ads for the first time since 2005. And obviously, the world has changed a lot since 2005. 

Bex: Wow, I can't believe it. 2005?! Everyone had to go to like a physical space to do gambling. Since then, it's a massive change. Why is it taking so long?

Jessica: It’s huge isn’t it? It’s absolutely huge. Monzo is the first bank in the UK to launch essentially a gambling block for our customers. So, what happens is if you're a Monzo customer and you feel like you're struggling with your gambling, you can activate the feature entirely optionally to block card transactions to gambling merchants. So you'd be unable to transact and you can turn that feature off but it involves friction. There's a 48 hour cooldown period, so you can sort of wait to transition out of that hot state, where you want to gamble back to the cold state and you also have to speak to some of our customer support in order to do that. That was all designed by Natalie. She actually won an award by it, so I'm sure she'd be happy to talk to you a little bit more in detail on that. But with the Gambling Act, we saw this as a huge opportunity to try and drive some change within the financial services industry. There's a lot of debate about the role that banks can play spotting problem gambling, helping to do affordability checks, things like that. But one of the clearest things that helps consumers are these gambling blocks. We launched one in 2018, but you know, it's by no means unique anymore. A lot of the major banks have it. About 60% of the current accounts in the market currently have a gambling block available for their users. But we were hoping to sort of use the Gambling Act to try and make sure that that's 100% of the current accounts in the market. So anyone, regardless of who they bank with in the UK, can access that feature. Essentially we did this because we launched it back in 2018 but there's a lot of evidence that has come out since to say that these features really do help people and so it's now recommended as part of a self-exclusion triangle of tools by Bristol University and their personal finance research team there. So, as part of these tools that help people that are in a treatment plan, and the other two things that we're doing all around transparency. So we're trying to lift transparency within the gambling industry to help us expand our existing toolset for our consumers. So, we're also calling on the government to try and mandate that gambling firms have to disclose their bank account details into the central registry. Obviously that doesn't have to be public, but it does need to be accessible by financial services, so we can start sustainably blocking bank transfers to gambling firms as well as those card payments. Because right now, we don't have the visibility. We don't know what account numbers and sort codes are registered to gambling firms, and it's really difficult for us to build that sustainable level of block. So that's the other thing that we're looking at with regards to the Gambling Act. The last thing that we're sort of gradually and beginning to sort of examine is around loot boxes in gaming. This actually came about as a result of our customers talking to us. Our customers reported the bank transfer issue. They started talking to us about how they'd really like to be able to expand this gambling block over to loot box transactions as well. We also had some NHS clinicians get in touch with us saying, is it possible to use this technology and do it for loot boxes, and unfortunately we sort of had to turn around and say, right now no. We don't have the visibility about whether someone's transacting with a loot box or whether they're just buying FIFA. We can't see the difference, so we can't build the tool and that's the other thing that we kind of want to use this Gambling Act Review to start talking about. It’s going to be a big problem. It's going to carry on growing and if we can get out ahead of it and not wait another fifteen years for these kinds of things to stack up. 

Bex: That would be good [laughs] 

Jessica: Yeah. Exactly. 

Bex: I have a few questions if you don't mind. They’re probably very silly questions but I've always heard about the block but really had wondered how it actually worked. I suppose people opt in and say I would like a block. And are they allowed to like deactivate it? Is it really easy to activate? Talk to me about the block.

Natalie: I can take you through that if you like. Just before I do though. Like Jess said, I designed it. I was part of a team. I don't want to take all the credit for it at all. I was part of an amazing team of engineers and designers who worked on this but I did the research behind how it works, which is why I can happily explain to you the technical side of how it works as well as you know, just for customers or people who are listening who might want to use it. So, basically the gambling block works. It sits inside your Monzo app, so you can hop into your settings and you can see it in the limits and control section. And it just says block gambling transactions and it's a little toggle. So nice and easy to switch on. It's completely opt-in for customers; we don't impose this on anyone. This is an optional tool for anyone who wants to use it. So you can really easily turn it on in the app but you can also reach out to our customer support and request for it to be switched on as well that way. So that can be over the phone or in the chat or over email. And then once the gambling block is on, what basically it does so how it kind of works, you know on the technical side of things, every transaction is tagged with what's called a merchant category code, an MCC and that's provided to us by MasterCard. So that's the information that is passed to us, and it really just identifies what kind of thing you’re spending the money on. So it's how we built all of our budgeting tools inside Monzo. So if you spend it on groceries, if you’re spending on entertainment or cinema, etc, that merchant category code is how we identify that. And there's one for gambling. So, the entire gambling block is built around these gambling and merchant category codes and really all that happens is  when you are going to spend any card and that can be in person, you know in a bookmaker or it can be online, the code comes back to us and we just block the transaction. We decline it at that point of sale. So,  that's how the block works when it's on and then to turn it off, so if you wanted to gamble again, what you'd have to do, if you went back into your app, you would see that the toggle is kind of greyed out now and if you try and switch it back off, it will just come up with a message and say, you need to chat to us to switch this off. So, you have to go through customer support and we think that human intervention is really important for people who need it. So it gives us the opportunity to have a conversation and that conversation might be really quick, you might not have a problem with gambling, You may have just turned it on, because you think it's, you know, an extra, safeguarding protection. Lots of our customers say they use it for security. So it might be a quick conversation. But we do ask you some questions and really those questions are centred around if your circumstances have changed, if you've disclosed gambling addiction to us before and we've noted that on your account, with your permission, of course then we might have a larger conversation with you and we might, you know, really question, but not police your decision to do this. Basically, we have these series of questions that kind of just makes customers kind of stop and think for a second. But we're not policing anyone's transactions and if a customer wants it switched off, then that's okay. We will set the cooldown period at that point. So, then they have to wait 48 hours for the gambling block to , like that toggle basically becomes active and you can switch it off from there. And usually by that point, if you've got that sort of compulsion, that urge to gamble, it's gone away, and we get lots of customers say that, and then they just switch it back on, and everything's fine. But yeah, that's kind of how it works and how easy and hard it is to turn on and off and we think that kind of conversational friction, the human interaction combined with a 48-hour cooldown period for our customers who have said they're struggling, really, really helps. It also gives us the opportunity to have a conversation about other measures that we can help with on their account. So there's extra things that we can do. We know that the gambling block isn’t this no silver bullet, it doesn't fix everything. It is a tool designed to be used alongside other self exclusion methods. So things like, you know, blocking software on a computer, things like Gamban. So we might have a chat around that. But yeah, at that point, we do like to have quite a good conversation with the customer and really try and understand whether there's any more we can do to help. 

Bex: I think that's brilliant for two reasons. Probably loads of other reasons but two come to mind. The first one is that that's a lot of effort and work that Monzo put into that and when I think of for profit companies, and I think that takes a lot of time and effort and obviously therefore money because you put time into it, like, normally people don't do it. Because, you know, return on investment. So it's great but like clearly there's a lot of time going into it shows that it really matters to you. Yeah, so like we always talk in the design industry don't we, oh remove friction, remove friction, but actually sometimes you need to add friction. And I do like to use this as an example of why you might want to add friction sometimes.

Natalie: Yeah. Exactly. And I think it's important to have that conversation, as designers, as people who work in product around when friction is appropriate and when that kind of investment in conversations with customers it's appropriate. Because absolutely, we're a bank with 5 million customers now. We are absolutely trying to put self serve tools in front of our customers and give them help articles so that they can navigate through customer support themselves. They really don't need to talk to us about everything. There's loads of situations that customers can actually resolve themselves in the app now. But there's a real value in investing time in having a conversation, particularly around such a difficult topic like gambling, with somebody who is vulnerable and you know really at a low moment. We think it's worth the investment and I think that's the important thing. It's the same with friction. You know, we want to make it really easy for people to see their finances, to understand where they're spending the money. We want to make lots of things easy about banking, but there's some things that we want to make hard, and it's important to kind of understand where to draw those lines. Is it a good thing that you can take out the savings pot so quickly, without making sure that the language you're using to lock your money away for so long, is understandable. It's got to really consider all types of customers and make sure that everybody understands what they're doing before they make big account changes. I’ts usper important. 

Jessica: I mean we definitely didn't just sort of jump to the friction without an evidence base either.  So when the team were designing it, and they worked very, very closely with a lot of experts like Experian, researchers, charities, things like that, to try and design something and friction came out of those conversations. So we were quite lucky in a way that when we sort of came back to this a few years later and said look we can try and make this industry standard, we already had all those people that Natalie and the team had worked with, who helped us design this feature and who were happy to sit onboard and join a coalition with us and say, actually yes as an NHS commission, as a gambling reduction charity, we think that this would help. Which I think is really powerful in this space and when you're trying to make those kind of steps towards policy change.

Bex: As part of this policy change, you mentioned the MCC codes. You want it to be more open. So you're saying that they're tagged with gambling. Are you saying that some of them aren't now because there's so many out there. Is that what's happening? 

Jessica : So there's a couple of problems when it comes to visibility. So the block that we have on the market and most of the banks have in the market today, I think pretty much all the banks, is run via this sort of card scheme, Rails. So it blocks card transactions and does that via these MCC codes. The problem that arises is when consumers are using new ways to pay. So you've got innovations in open banking. More people are using bank transfer rails to make retail transactions, and you don't have that visibility over the payment chain with those types of payments. And so there's no MCC code, there's no feedback loop. We don't know where your money is going before we allow you to initiate that transaction. And that's really the problem that we're trying to solve. One of the more interesting things that we've been doing recently on this is, we've actually worked with an open banking provider, Trulioo, who serve a lot of the major gambling firms in the UK, to build an open banking powered gambling block extension that helps us gain that visibility over the payment change. So Truloo, kindly worked with us to basically allow us to know whether or not they are initiating a payment to a gambling firm before we allow that to leave our customers accounts, who have that gambling block activated. So it's all about trying to build that transparency, build that visibility to kind of bring it all under that, but no. In short, no there’s gaps. 

Natalie: And it's an important thing to actually go back to the conversation that we just had a second ago about friction. Because you know, the gambling operators are doing a great job for their customers in their eyes, you know, they're creating more payment methods and more deposit methods. That's great for most consumers, but it isn't great for those who are struggling. So from our perspective, what we were finding was customers were going to a gambling operator, and they were using their Monzo card to pay via a slightly different method, and they expected the block to work, but it didn't and it's because that payment method was, like Jess said, through open banking and it's not really for consumers to try and decipher payment methods. Like, you know you're using your Monzo account and you expect a gambling block to work and when it doesn't work, you know, it's not great, right, so we really wanted to try and close that loophole and really try to make sure that when a customer expects that block to work, it should work. And this is only going to become a bigger problem if we don't address it as an industry now. As these payment innovations are happening and all these new methods are coming in, which like I said is great for most customers, but it's not great when you really need the gambling block to work. 

Bex: I’ve still got so many questions. I'm trying to wrap up over the next five minutes but I want to ask you so many things. I think one thing that I thought was interesting Jess, about what you said was about loot boxes. And again, like, 2005 not reviewing, you know, the Gambling Act in that amount of time, loot boxes is such a new and interesting way to like bring that out in gaming, of all places. So I don't know if you want to talk a little bit more about loot boxes for people who might not have come up before and how that's playing out as well. 

Jessica: Yeah, I mean, obviously you know there's a wider debate going on about whether or not these kind of features should be classified as gambling, and it's definitely not something that I can speak to. Until I joined Monzo, I’d never even seen a loot box. I don't online game. So I don't pretend to be the expert here. It very much comes from our customers and from the people who are talking to us and asking us to do this stuff. But yes, essentially there is a growing concern, as far as we can see about the use of these loot boxes in gaming. You pay real money, in many cases, to get this sort of randomised reward or a chance at a randomised reward and a lot of these behaviours encourages overspending, mirrors some of the issues that people have with their gambling. And we aren't qualified to say that one leads to the other or there's a causation here, but what we can say is that people would benefit from more control when it comes to their loot box transactions, just as they would benefit from more control when it comes to their gambling transactions. 

Bex: Yeah, it makes perfect sense. I mean, when we think of all the nudging and gamification, it’s all about manipulating people to continue to do something, and if used in this manipulative way just purely to make money, I'm thinking of like in app purchase sort of stuff as well where it can be very spammy and manipulative. I've done it myself. I've got a game that looks fun and all of a sudden you're like, ohhh, if I just pay this little bit, I can get this little thing and the next thing you know you've spent a tenner and you're like, wait, what, what's happened here. That happened way quickly and more unexpectedly than I thought it would. So, yeah, there's a lot of new things that maybe you don't think of as gambling that we need to keep an eye on as well.

Jessica: Yeah absolutely and it's only gonna keep evolving. Obviously, none of what we're suggesting as Natalie says, is the silver bullet, but we've got to keep the conversation going. If we don't respond to new innovations, new tech, it's all just going to get more and more outdated. Oh your cat is adorable.

Bex: She's just walking right in front of me. That's great. That's really helpful Marce. Thanks. I've got five of them. I don't know why I do it to myself. They're all awful. [laughs] It’s too many cats, it’s too many cats. I foster for a local cat sanctuary, so you end up just keeping them when they're really broken [laughs] Get out of the way Marce, thank you. 

Jessica: She’s adorable. 

Bex: She's very cute. She likes to stick to me. She’s like my shadow, which is adorable but very annoying. And, well, like totally put me off now. What else did I want to ask about?  But I think we've run out of time so I don't know if I've got a lot more chance to ask you questions. I suppose the main one that I wanted to kind of end on a positive. How's the campaign going? When will we know if it's been successful to some extent? I know these things are ongoing generally but we've got the Gambling Act Review as a date to aim for, I suppose.

Jessica: Yeah, yeah. So it’s been going really well. It's been a real pleasure to pull this together so far.

Bex: Hang on, I'm so sorry. She's turned music on [laughs] I don’t know how to turn it off. A bit of Solange, a bit of Solange [laughs] Sorry, carry on.

Jessica: [laughs] Yes, so the campaign is going really well and we've been really lucky with the amount of support we've been able to generate. Some of the people from NHS clinics across the country, in Leeds, in London. Big, big gambling harm reduction charities, leading academics, all of these people kind of, you know, it's very much not Monzo’s call. It's very much a coalition call for this, and we're hopeful. I think there's a lot that can be covered by the Gambling Act review, and there's a lot that needs to be covered but we're hoping that our kind of little section of this wider picture does manage to get cut through because it really can help people that are struggling. Obviously there's huge issues to be contended with, in terms of advertising, in terms of affordability. But, you know, this kind of small section is well evidenced, it’s easy to build and we're hoping that people will just be able to come on board.

Bex: Amazing, thank you so much for joining me and Marceline, obviously. My assistant. It's been a really nice chat, and I'm really glad that we've managed to catch up with you on everything that you're working on because it always sounds brilliant. Um, yeah, thanks for joining.

Jessica: Thank you so much, it's much fun.

Natalie: Thank you. Yeah, loved it.

Bex: Are we friends now, that's the main question. 

Natalie: Absolutely. 

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