Monzo bank was once the neon poster child for fintech and the ideal of what banking could be.
It was digital banks like Monzo that gave us ‘pots’ to be able to save without a separate savings account, ‘split the bill’ feature digitally rather than sit counting cash, and let’s not forget the ‘penny pot’ where your spending is rounded up and those pennies are saved up in a piggy bank for a rainy day.
Monzo were clever and customer centric. They were the complete opposite to the bureaucracy, constant paperwork, and bad customer service of the traditional, high street banks. They offered a new way; a more progressive and refreshing way of banking. However, in what is yet another poor decision by Monzo, it seems the neon poster child has grown-up and decided to go down the same lifeless, grey-suited path as every other bank.
According to a report in The Telegraph, Monzo has joined the growing number of organisations who have dealt with remote working by introducing a surveillance system to check their customer service staff are working by logging their activity levels every five minutes. Staff are required to be working on their devices for 85% of the day, and if they don’t hit that target, they are sent on a performance improvement programme.
It’s not quite the workplace culture they are known for shouting about. For instance, in their blog on the Monzo website in 2022, they declared:
“We’ve always cared immensely about the well-being of our employees.”
and….
“Monzo trusts its employees to get their work done at times that make sense for them and their teams.”
Quite clearly, from this recent report in The Telegraph, things have taken a turn for the worst. Trust at Monzo has disappeared.
It all started with customer trust
Unfortunately, we’d like to say that this is the first instance of Monzo ditching trust over control, but it’s not. In 2020, the BBC Watchdog investigated Monzo for closing people’s accounts without warning and leaving them with no money. In some instances, people couldn’t receive their pay as their account was closed. Monzo gave no explanation to customers and held their money for up to 40 days.
To make matters even worse, many account holders were given no support or guidance from Monzo about what to do. One case revealed how an individual had called Monzo, and the advice they gave was to “borrow money from friends or family.”
Under the money laundering regulations, any bank has the right to freeze accounts if they believe there is suspicious activity. But as the Watchdog investigation revealed, the number of cases that were being filed against Monzo by customers raised questions about whether they may be getting it wrong. Some financial experts even questioned whether Monzo’s compliance procedures had caught up with their exponential growth.
In 2021, comparison site, comparebanks.co.uk, reported on a Facebook group set up to support customers of Monzo who unexpectedly had their accounts closed. At that point, the group had reached more than 9,000 members, and data from the Financial Ombudsman revealed that 1,392 complaints about Monzo were lodged in 2020, an increase of 177% compared to the previous year.
In 2022, the UK Competitions and Markets Authority ordered Monzo to review the way it informs customers about their financial history, after it was discovered that 13,000 customers were not sent transactional data when leaving Monzo.
Adam Land, Senior Director at the CMA, commented; “Having a record of your financial transactions can act as important evidence needed to secure a loan or mortgage – so Monzo’s failure to provide these put an unnecessary obstacle in the way of thousands of customers.”
Time and time again, Monzo is showing us that it isn’t the customer-centric bank it likes to project. On their website, Monzo state, “We’re doing things differently. For too long, banking has been obtuse, complex and opaque. We want to change that and build a bank with everyone, for everyone.” Monzo might just be swallowing these words, as actions always speak louder than words.
Perhaps they could take a page from Semco Style and explore the principle of Extreme Stakeholder Alignment. The practices that we use in Extreme Stakeholder Alignment involve working collaboratively with customers and external stakeholders and partners to co-design better ways of working and better processes that deliver outstanding customer experiences. Yet, instead of this approach, Monzo appears to want to make their customers feel like they are to blame for having their accounts closed, when reality shows that in the majority of cases, they are not. As revealed in the Watchdog Investigation, most accounts were frozen for no reason.
Surely Monzo is apologetic about this? But Monzo appears to not accept any responsibility for the pain it's caused customers and offers no support or advice for those who arenow suffering the consequences of their actions. Monzo’s approach isn’t customer-centric, it’s pure self-interest.
If Monzo were the true disruptors they claim to be, they would be addressing the issue head-on. Consulting with their customers and getting a Semco Style “Outside-in-Perspective”, not hiding away and taking zero responsibility for the damage they’ve caused.
What surveillance at Monzo says about trust
So, are we surprised by the surveillance on teams at Monzo? Of course not. Monzo are not the first, and unfortunately, they won’t be the last.
Monzo’s response to the report is that this is “normal practice” for customer support, and says that they are not tracking activity, but “availability to work."
At Semco Style UK, we don’t think any kind of surveillance should be deemed as “normal”. As Gabor Mate alludes to in his book ‘Myth of Normal,' this is a classic example of the world gone mad, where we have been socially conditioned to accept these kinds of restrictions as normal. We accept it.
We wonder what their customer service team feels about that statement? Do they think it is "normal" to have their work constantly monitored to this extent? And a better question would be, who decided on this type of surveillance to begin with, because it probably wasn’t the team. No doubt it was a top-down decision that got pushed onto staff who are now frantically ensuring their activity doesn’t waver in fear of punishment.
The reasons given by companies that track activity is that they want to monitor productivity and efficiency, but this drive to track activity is really an indication of the level of trust, and the management fundamentally believes that they need to oversee the activity of their people to make sure they are working.
Surveillance of staff only engenders resentment and fear; toxic culture traits that don’t lead to increased productivity, but an environment that engenders greater fear, escalates stress and ultimately leads to declining performance: the exact opposite of what companies are really trying to achieve.
If Monzo has a productivity problem, surveillance is not the solution. There must be a deeper, underlying problem that we can search out and find elsewhere. Perhaps, it has more to do with how they operate as a business and the mindset they demonstrate towards their staff.
Monzo as it is right now, has lost its sheen as a disruptor brand, having now gone down the well-trodden path of all the other bureaucratic organisations: it has shown that it doesn’t care about its people or its customers in the way that it claims. Maybe they could learn a thing or two from the brave, pioneering organisations we work with, such as ABN Amro, who partnered with us at Semco Style to put trust before control.
Do you want to learn more about how you can experiment with new ways of working that places trust right at the heart of the working relationship? Our Semco Experience is a high-impact, one-day, immersive session for up to 50 participants giving you a hefty grasp of how you can redesign your organisation around trust and alternative controls. Talk to one of the team today to find out more about our work and how we can support you.
