Sitting across from me at his wooden kitchen table, he says Silicon Valley, where many of his investors are based, is an exciting place, but has “got weirder”. Blomfield is more ambitious than that. He says he tries to leave his laptop at home when he’s on holiday, bakes his own sourdough, and makes his own pottery (“I know, I know, the tech cliché…”). That ended a year ago, when Monzo capped free withdrawals at £200 a month (after which a 3 per cent fee applies) and moved cardholders to its new current account. When it’s time to renew your mortgage, we will find the best providers’: Tom Blomfield. “Let’s just talk about ‘Don’t be evil’ for a second,” he says. But he’s also a stickler for rules, and avowedly risk-averse. But then Monzo is no ordinary bank. Blomfield is a businessman, not a tech guru. He founded his first company, Boso.com, when he was 21, but failed to raise any money. “You’re actually reducing someone’s optionality there. If Monzo really is transitioning from startup to bank, there are bank-sized questions to ask. “One problem is this myopic bubble culture. It is officially a “fintech unicorn”, one of the rare British startups to be valued at over £1bn. What is the account balance of the founder and CEO of the fastest growing bank in the country? https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/tom-blomfield-leaving-monzo-085437023.html “If you take Monzo, N26 and Revolut, three relatively similar products, we each had hundreds of millions of investments in one sector,” Blomfield says. His downtime is spent playing Starcraft or cooking with his girlfriend. They certainly don’t lean over to show you their current balance, mid-conversation. Monzo currently looks after about £1.1bn, and, though other banks lend most of the millions they have sitting in deposits, none of Monzo’s cash is being flash-traded or gambled or divvied up into baroque financial instruments. If I could go home and flick a switch and not think about Monzo, it would be great.”. Earlier this year it raised £113m from a Californian investment group, which doubled its value to £2bn. He lasted one day in the cold December rain before convincing the guys that leaflets were old school and they really needed a website, which Tom then built and still exists today. Then change your phone number. Back then, in 2015, the coral-coloured card was especially popular with travellers, as it offered free cash withdrawals abroad. But to a behavioural psychologist it’s perfectly obvious.”, A similar philosophy lies behind the gambling block pioneered by Monzo’s vulnerable customers team – since copied by other banks. “I worry that we’ve not got the winning model yet,” he says. How about you try to leave the world a little better than you found it?”. They don’t turn up for interviews in a stripy T-shirt, munching on a banana. Blomfield doesn’t like to distinguish himself from Monzo’s core customers – he’s a millennial with budgeting issues. The economy has functioned on cheap credit for more than a generation now – banks lending you money they don’t really have so you can buy stuff you don’t really need. I’m surprised more companies don’t do that, to be honest.”. “But alcohol and cigarettes are the two I would really love to put a block on.” Monzo doesn’t have the data to do this by itself, he explains. If found, it’s easy to get it working again. As a law student, Blomfield spent a lot of time thinking about jurisprudence: “Can you ever make a rule today that you can’t undo in the future? You can see why civil liberties campaigners might be concerned: imagine if Universal Credit were contingent on cigarette consumption. Major high street banks now offer the same feature. The app’s interface, which was attractive and easy-to-read, promised, gratifyingly, a kind of control. Monzo stressed that no fraud had taken place, but clearly, it might have. He’s betting on reaching not just more millennials, but their parents, too. Google famously vowed not to be evil – until it worked out how to convert its data into cash. And, as it promises, can Monzo really “make money work for everyone” as it moves into overdrafts, loans and mortgages, too? Monzo has teamed up with a partner bank in Ohio and is planning a “grassroots” launch. “It's like, come on. If it becomes the size of Lloyds, or Deutsche Bank, what is to stop it behaving like other banks that size? Meet Tom Blomfield, 33-year-old do-it-all boss of trendy bank Monzo who wants to file your tax return and stick savings in pots Monzo now has 2million users and an almost cult-like following Tom Blomfield doesn’t come across like the CEO of a bank. Meanwhile, we seem to be endlessly obsessed with the minutiae of other people’s finances: witness the popularity of Refinery 29’s money diaries, or the constant babyboomer complaints about millennial avocado habits. His friends are doctors, teachers, builders, lawyers, musicians. Given the precarity of modern employment, it is no wonder more of us are being mindful about our money. Monzo hopes to have 3m customers by the end of 2019 – not just millennials but their parents, too. An interview with Tom Blomfield, co-founder of Monzo The first job Tom Blomfield (left in photo) ever had was delivering leaflets for estate agent Wilson Heal . Similarly, incumbents have started allowing online customers to track when and where they spend their money using Google maps. Here’s the best rate, here’s the best customer service, you choose but we proactively find the best deals for you. In the Sunday Times piece, Blomfield is described brooding over a girlfriend, torpedoing investment meetings, and failing to properly cater a Sunday roast. “The next problem with banks is going to be technology. Why not introduce, say, a McDonald’s block? But clearly switching off is hard. He now lives in East London with his girlfriend of two years and two friends. There are more than 40,000 members of the bank’s community forum (5.62% of the company is owned by microfunders) and they seem happy to defend the company on social media and pitch in with ideas, too. om Blomfield doesn’t come across like the CEO of a bank. One of Monzo’s most popular features is the “pot”. Read more: Monzo review: an elegant way to manage your money. Maybe control is more important to us than choice. Monzo office dog Bingo with chief executive Tom Blomfield. “But what Tesco could do is send entire receipt data through the Mastercard and Visa networks, which would then enable us to say: ‘Aha! But leaning into tech clichés isn’t without risks; if anything, brands like Amazon and Facebook are currently more toxic-seeming than NatWest or Barclays. Pictured, talking at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2017 at Arena Berlin on December 4, 2017 You may have seen … He readily acknowledges that what he did was risk-free: “I went to a good school, went to Oxford university – I had an amount of privilege.” In the early days, the law graduate worked for about a year without a salary. “I mostly just read stuff for fun - Chaos Monkeys or Bad Blood,” says Tom Blomfield, CEO and cofounder of Monzo, of two riveting tales of startup life that don't quite go to plan. Monzo is also inherently different, says Blomfield; indeed, analysts praise its transparency and the communities it developed for both customers and software developers. There are regulations to comply with, staff to hire, and the small matter of disrupting the banking sector in the US. … They certainly don’t lean over to show you their current balance, mid-conversation. More and more are now offering services similar to Monzo, forcing their digital rival to keep innovating. Maybe 45. “On a spectrum of risk,” he says, “we’re literally the safest bank you could possibly imagine, because the money just sits in the central bank.” He is reassuring me. How safe is our money? And while it’s hardly reassuring to imagine a cyber- financial crisis might look like, it would be more worrying if he weren’t worried about one. But it was the app that really won over its early customers. I first met Blomfield a couple of years ago, when Monzo’s distinctive fluoro charge cards were just becoming a must-flash accessory for tech-savvy millennials. (The staff is around 65% men.) For all its high-tech innovations, Monzo’s success mostly comes from treating customers as people as opposed to econs – the supposedly rational, profit-maximising consumers that economists have traditionally assumed us to be. Monzo customers were offered free cash withdrawals abroad, but that doesn’t come cheap. https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/politics/article/50-most-influential-britain-2020 Now, he says, he’s being asked whether he worries “that other banks are going to catch up”. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, thenView saved stories. People are paying $3-4,000 a month for a single-bedroom apartment now. “The idea is that we become the kind of storefront for everything. His girlfriend, Hannah-Polly Williams, works for the refugee charity International Rescue Committee. The 35-year-old Monzo founder was already struggling to … “Honestly? It’s also not improbable. Tom Blomfield, 34, is the CEO of Monzo. He finishes the call, disappears into the main office, and then re-emerges one minute later and introduces himself as Mr Tom Blomfield, 31, the founder and CEO of Monzo, an app-based bank that has raised £19.5m in funding, gained 300,000 customers and processed £1.5bn of cash in … Auditors get very nervous when bank CEOs start moving money into their own accounts.”. Last week (after this interview had taken place), Monzo urged 480,000 customers to change their pin numbers, after it emerged that the data had not been stored in the most secure part of the bank’s internal databases, leaving it exposed to 110 “unauthorised” engineers, who could have accessed the pin numbers over a six-month period. Blomfield is talking at Monzo’s office, on Finsbury Square, east London, where the vibe is more “tech” than “fin”. When he's not working, he's a fan of video games and cycling. Blomfield actually wants to show me a feature on the Monzo app, a piece of software that has become bank manager, financial advisor and, in some cases, personal counsellor, to its 2.5m customers. And our data? – Netflix's Love, Death & Robots is just tedious sexist sci-fi, – The grim reality of life under London's Gangs Matrix, – Care about online privacy? And he is keen to distance himself from the hustle culture – he doesn’t get up at 4am or take blood transfusions from teenage interns. There are meeting rooms with names like “Batcave”; fridges stocked with directional sodas; a ping-pong table; an office cockapoo. For example, when it’s time to renew your mortgage, we come to you proactively and say, hey, we’ve gone out and we’ve found these three or four providers, which one would you like? We ask Tom Slater about its 105% return in a year, Tesla, and investments for the future 'UK equities could be the perfect way to play a global reopening at a fair price': Tom Becket It makes lots of people nervous, but if you don’t know, how can you be sure that you’re not systematically underpaying one set of people – writers or designers or women or people from certain ethnic backgrounds?”. Blomfield accepts the comparison, “But they need to keep persuading people to come back to the site each year,” he says. Unless the UK fails as a country, that money is safe.”. I typically get up after 8am, I love to sleep,” laughs Blomfield as he sits in his Finsbury Square office. 685 Followers, 458 Following, 195 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Tom Blomfield (@tom_blomfield) Monzo founder Tom Blomfield, left, and Starling founder Anne Boden. It’s the most stable he’s been for a while. So I spend a lot of time thinking about systems resilience.” Monzo is regulated just like any other bank – its customers are protected up to the standard £85,000 under the government’s Financial Services Compensation scheme. Sunday September 16 2018, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times. It’s hard to think of a financial brand that commands that sort of loyalty besides MoneySavingExpert.com (MSE), the personal finance community founded by Martin Lewis, aka “the most trusted man in Britain”. (“Hot coral” is the card colour’s official name.) “Five days until payday!” Blomfield says. I’m worried about some catastrophic event, whether it’s a data breach, a cybersecurity incident, an infrastructure outage, which means our systems go down and we lose people’s money and Monzo is over. “I can't remember a time ever in the history of European technology where three companies have raised hundreds of millions in a single sector, let alone one company.”, – The Play Store is packed with nasty, violent games for kids. His downtime is spent playing Starcraft or cooking with his girlfriend. It feels like dystopia.”, The City of London is hardly an egalitarian paradise, but there is at least some “diversity of thought”, Blomfield thinks. Blomfield says that Monzo will co-exist with legacy banks, but he hopes his bank will become a personal finance hub where customers manage their mortgage and savings accounts along with products from other banks. The company, which offers a prepaid money card and is rolling out current accounts, is asking its customers to choose the best new charging option for ATM fees abroad, saying its existing policy has become simply too costly to continue. But Monzo has more workaday challenges to meet first, not least persuading its customers to deposit more of their actual salaries in their accounts. Blomfield worked at Starling before leaving to found Monzo. Tinkov writes that in 2016 they thought about acquiring hip western neo-banks and he met with Tom Blomfield of Monzo. The fact that all of this is on Blomfield’s agenda speaks to a new financial culture that has emerged in the post-crash era. “Why should anyone not know what anyone else is paid? “And someone new will come along with some way of managing your money that everyone then flocks to.”. Can we as a company put a set of rules in place that mean in the future we can’t break those rules? Monzo founder Tom Blomfield said the business was now focused on “becoming a sustainable company that’s here for the long haul.” Story continues Plus and Premium are Monzo’s first paid-for accounts, part of a ramping up of efforts to try and generate revenue and hit profitability . Blomfield hopes to reach 3m customers by the end of the year. Lily Allen had just tweeted about how much she loved her card. After GoCardless, he served as chief technical officer at Starling Bank, now a competitor – which he left to found Monzo. If that means revealing all in the process, he’s fine with it. It would be “pointless even if it were true”, says Tom Blomfield, the 33-year-old co-founder of one of Europe’s newest unicorns – digital bank Monzo. A more recent iteration is the “locked pot”, which prevents users from accessing those savings for a year, if they choose. Bank CEOs aren’t usually 33. Blomfield seems to be saying: maybe we wouldn’t need to borrow so much money if we didn’t buy so much stuff. “I read these things and feel inferior for about a second, until I realise it’s bullshit.” Blomfield has worked hard to … It’s problematic if you’re trying to build a product that works for everyone. His friends are doctors, teachers, builders, lawyers, musicians. But he is not worried. But legacy banks aren’t standing still. For two years, Blomfield has lived in his Hoxton home with his girlfriend, who works for a charity, and two friends. “It’s like, come on. More than five years after starting the company, Monzo co-founder Tom Blomfield is stepping down as CEO of the U.K. challenger bank to take up the newly created role of … For the sake of transparency, anyone can read the minutes from Monzo board meetings; that transparency doesn’t extend to revealing who gets paid what. Boden readily admits in the book that her and Blomfield made something of an odd couple and hints at … We have a very strict finance department. But for the individual who struggles with impulse control in the face of societal pressure to spend, it’s quite appealing. This piece was amended on 15 August 2019 to correct a quotation. That would appear to give lots of power to Monzo, but Blomfield stresses that power really lies in the “community”. I typically get up after 8am, I love to sleep,” laughs Blomfield as he sits in his Finsbury Square office. Consider it Monzo 2.0. “McDonald’s, yeah, you could do a McDonald’s block quite easily,” says Blomfield. It wasn’t the only challenger bank to emerge in the wake of post-financial crisis reforms – Revolut, Tandem and Starling are among its rivals – but it was the most fun to use, with a satisfying “ker-ching” when you topped up your card, and emoji-rich updates when you spent your money. “Such a limited statement. While the breakup is still raw, it was unsurprising in hindsight. Blomfield appears all too aware. The bank manager will see you now: is Monzo ready to grow up? Tom Blomfield was not prepared for the stress that the Covid-19 crisis would unleash on the banking sector and his own mental health. That is the “shiny new toy”, but Blomfield is trying not to be too distracted by it for the moment. And then there's the financial inclusion feature that Blomfield says he’s particularly proud of, which allows people without a fixed address to open a bank account, even refugees. The bank manager will see you now: Tom Blomfield, CEO of Monzo. Finally, the digital bank recently introduced “gambling blocks” to help cardholders kick gambling addiction. The bank is currently acquiring 100,000 new customers a month, growing by roughly 1.2 million accounts each year. Monzo was a bank that lived on your phone. “I read these things and feel inferior for about a second, until I realise it's bullshit.”, Blomfield has worked hard to find his zen. Monzo's Tom Blomfield on lie-ins, video games and finding his zen, For legacy banks playing catch-up, Monzo is a fast-moving target – but that doesn't mean its founder subscribes to tired entrepreneurial clichés, Monzo review: an elegant way to manage your money. His next venture, fintech startup GoCardless, struggled to get seed capital. “I’m very, very excited about that. They don’t turn up for interviews in a stripy T-shirt, munching on a banana. He is no longer too concerned about the bigger banks launching their own Monzo-esque features. “It’s lost its magic,” he says. Liam Kelly. One typical headline of the time read: “Digital bank Monzo’s losses more than quadruple.”. After a law degree, he became a management consultant and worked at a few start-ups before leaving now-rival Starling Bank to start Monzo. Monzo is a fast-moving target. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. Is the financial app with a social conscience and a cult following ready to take the next step and compete with the high-street giants? On the bank’s forum, users can vote for new features, which prompted the name change from the original Mondo to Monzo, and help the startup determine an acceptable fee for cash withdrawals. “When we started four years ago, people said ‘You'll never get any customers, it’s going to be impossible getting them to switch from a traditional bank, you’ll never make a dent’,” Blomfield recalls. Last modified on Thu 16 Jan 2020 16.17 GMT. His downtime is spent playing Starcraft or cooking with his girlfriend. And the amount of money that you need to survive in San Francisco is insanity! When he was younger, he put in 90-hour working weeks, edging close to a burnout. And a new strategy has emerged. If you want to save for a holiday, for example, you can channel a certain amount of your money into a “pot”. Presumably he can bring his own payday forward. Bank CEOs aren’t usually 33. “It’s continuously a question that nags us,” he says. When he was putting together a follow up meeting, Tom said he is going away for a two week holiday to India with his girlfriend. I think that’s a fundamental challenge to the big banks’ business models because they rely on cross-sale of their own products.”, Another unrealised dream is to turn Monzo into a social enterprise. Startup bank Monzo is doing away with one of its most popular features — unlimited free ATM withdrawals overseas. Mr Blomfield now lives 10 minutes away, near Shoreditch Park. But a recent TV ad campaign targeted older customers, prompting 260,000 account openings in June alone. At the time, Monzo’s numbers were impressive. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. Overall, he says, legacy banks won’t be able to follow Monzo because they are too focused on where the challenger bank is today rather than where it will be in the near future. “It seems bizarre. “I probably work 40 hours a week. Red alert: Lily Allen tweeted how much she loved her card. His girlfriend, Ms Hannah-Polly Williams, works in fundraising for the refugee charity International … Most of our staff are in their 20s and 30s, and people in their 40s and 50s find it much harder to integrate.” He is about to hire a diversity inclusion leader. It’s not only 20-somethings who have money issues after all. So what is on his mind at 3am? That is terrifying.”. But it faced challenges. – Why does the London Tube still not have Wi-Fi in tunnels? Blomfield seems unusually keen to get ahead of any potential criticism, which can make him sound a little embattled. Tom Blomfield is no ordinary bank CEO. There’s alcohol on that!’ Then we could decline the transaction until you take the alcohol out of your cart and re-swipe your card. You go to a party in San Francisco, and everyone’s pitching VCs [venture capitals] or talking about their crypto-currencies. The runner-up is Nationwide, with about 900,000 new clients a year, although the building society pays each new customer hundreds of pounds as an incentive. All Monzo customers now have current accounts by default, as opposed to the prepaid cards the company originally launched. One source close who witnessed those early days described the book as a “hatchet job” on the Monzo founder. I typically get up after 8am, I love to sleep,” laughs Blomfield as he sits in his Finsbury Square office. The pressure comes from not being able to turn my brain off. When was the last time a pop-star tweeted about their bank card? His girlfriend, Hannah-Polly Williams, works for the refugee charity International Rescue Committee. “To an economist, that is totally illogical,” Blomfield says. I was profiling him for a fashion publication, and I was curious to hear how an Oxford law graduate, with stints at GoCardless and Starling behind him, had encouraged fashion publications to write about personal finance. Almost all of it sits in the Bank of England, which, for a bank, is about as dull as it gets. While Monzo is a experiencing fast growth, the health of the European fintech ecosystem has also helped its progress. In two days in March 2017 it raised £22m, breaking crowdfunding records on Crowdcube. In the Sunday Times piece, Blomfield is described brooding over a girlfriend, torpedoing investment meetings, and failing to properly cater a Sunday roast. The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our lives—from culture to business, science to design. Customers can opt to block all gambling transactions from their cards, with a 48-hour cooling-off period, “giving people that little bit of extra friction to control their behaviour in ways they want is incredibly powerful.”, It’s not hard to see how such features might be extended – and abused. “We’re also not great at age diversity. “My own payday?” He is aghast. Most have them now. Waking up at 3:45am, on the treadmill by 4am while going through emails, reading a book a day and finding time to meditate – that’s the myth of the superhuman startup founder. Increasingly, campaigners for fair pay encourage us to challenge taboos around salaries and, hopefully, reveal structural inequalities in the process. Less than you might imagine. “No! Recently, the company raised more than £200m in funding and plans to expand into the US. “And I knew if I failed, I could just go live in my parents’ garage.”. When Monzo launched, in 2015, its customer base was 95% male, 100% iPhone-owning, and highly concentrated in London. It’s entirely possible, it just needs all the shops to adopt it.”. ... Blomfield is described brooding over a girlfriend, torpedoing investment meetings, and failing to properly cater a … He’s just back from his latest trip to Silicon Valley, and he wasn’t impressed. Transactions at bookmakers are stopped before money leaves the account; Blomfield is certain that traditional banks will soon copy this move, too. The last financial crisis was all about credit risk and liquidity, he warns – essential banking problems. That’s why Monzo came up with the option to “freeze” your debit card temporarily if a user suspects it is lost or stolen, instead of cancelling it. He is keen to tell me that 26% of Monzo’s staff identify as non-straight, but laments that gender diversity “still isn’t very good”. But that was then. “The average Monzo customer checks their app 15 times a week.”, The dream, as yet unrealised, is to build MSE-style price comparison features into the app, so it would be the single place you control all of your finances: student loan, mortgage, savings, pension, credit cards. It had to change its name from Mondo following a copyright boo-boo, and it was losing money. Companies that rely on exploiting our passing weaknesses won’t like it either. WIRED is where tomorrow is realised. The bank still loses money – it has 1,000 staff, and counting – but Blomfield insists profitability is on the horizon. I worked in consulting before and we worked 70 hours a week as standard. FRANCESCO GUIDICINI. I was staying at a friend’s place and there were homeless people in deep, deep poverty camped outside the apartment. 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