What's a big I Sasha here and today we need to talk about Monza. Now yesterday, as I'm filming, this Monza released a brand new product called Monza plus now you may or may not know that they did exactly the same thing. Last year, they actually released a product called mono plus last year, and I've got some of the features of the last one. Over here.

The product came in three slightly different packages, depending on whether you like to travel or whether you didn't have slightly different features, but, generally speaking, there were three accounts and they came with free cash abroad, unique colored cards, discounts with various online merchants and services and insurance. Now that product didn't do very well, people were so used to using Monza cards absolutely for free, not having to pay for absolutely anything not having to pay any fees for anything whatsoever that they didn't really want to pay extra for, like questionable privileges for questionable set Of perks that they probably didn't really need did they need this insurance that came with it? They probably had it on one of their other cards. Do they need the free cash abroad, while 200 pounds a month is already free? Did they need a nice brightly? Colored card will be existing. Coral ones seem to be just fine, so that product flopped that didn't do very well and just five months later, at the end of the year, they decided to cancel it.

What happened afterwards is reportedly, I don't know the details. Reportedly, they fired a bunch of the team, they got a brand news products back together and they decided to go and relaunch it. Except this year it was going to be a heavily travel, focused card that they were gon na release a few months ago and obviously they didn't go ahead and do that so they changed the product slightly and released it just now - and this is what the product Comes with it comes with free cash abroad, unique colored cards, discounts with various online merchants and services and wait for it, no insurance right, okay. So let's talk about these particular benefits.

So, first off you have the free cash abroad. Now, whenever you do decide to go abroad, you can now withdraw cash on your monza card without having to pay any fees, except there is a limit. You can only do it up to four hundred pounds and without paying the monthly fee, you can already withdraw up to two hundred pounds without paying anything. So the difference is really really marginal.

I'm not really sure exactly what the value of that benefit to. Whoever is it's such a tiny little difference that it seems laughable that this is one of the main perks. Now, if the bright hot coral card is not quite to your liking, this five pound a month brand-new product will allow you to go and get a bluey sort of holographic color. Instead, I don't know about you.

Maybe this is the way things are going now, but I don't really frankly care specifically what color my card is and I'm certainly not in the mood for spending something like sixty pounds a year to get a slightly prettier version. Maybe some people are um. I don't know you get various discounts with online providers of services and various goods. You get things like Hello, fresh.

You get things like a big discount from naked wines, a few first-order, but the problem is you can get these discounts from military anywhere? These are the types of discounts that I see falling out of a magazine. Every time you open them. This is the sort of discounted. If you just googled it and went to any of the online voucher sites or any kind of discount websites, you can get exactly the same discount and so many places that I'm not sure why anyone would actually want to buy it.

In order to then go and have to look at them and then make use of them, they're very specific, they're, very specific to very particular types of people in very particular types of purchases, a quite London centric in terms of the types of foods and the types Of different places that you can spend them, I already see any value in that side of the product at all. So let's cover some of the other things. One of the things that you do get is one percent interest on balances up to two thousand pounds, which is pretty good. It doesn't only cover the main balance.

It covers any other balance of these spread into various different pots, but the rate is actually relatively low. So if you do want to invest money, if you do want to put it in some form of savings, if you want to earn interest on the money in a shape or form, you can probably go and get something that will earn you more than the 1 % and they're giving you, then, if you do, make the full use of the service or for the entire year. You carry balance of over two thousand pounds on your mom's, Oh card you're, going to get one percent return to you as a benefit, so the value of that is 20 pounds. The cost of the fee five pounds times.

12 is 60. So there's a whole forty pounds extra that you paying for the other perks and we're gon na try to figure out if they're worth it or not. Now, let's go through these perks one at a time and the problem we're gon na get into as we go through them is eyes. You'll begin to see the point that I'm trying to make here, which is almost all of these, are kind of like gimmicks.

Now the first perk is the free cash deposits at pay points, which is a nice touch. It means that, instead of having to pay a fee to load money into your bank account, you can now do it for free after paying the five pounds a month. Now, first off, you actually have to deposit quite a lot of cash reasonably regularly in order for the five pound a month fee to actually be worth it, even if you were paying the fees. Second, very few people actually do go in frequently deposit cash sure.

In some cases you might want to deposit cash into your bank account. Maybe your grandma is gon na give you some with your birthday card. Maybe you're gon na get paid in cash for whatever service that you provided whatever it is, you might want to go. Stick it into your bank account, but the problem is.

This is still Monza playing catch-up with pretty much every other bank in the UK. You can just walk into a branch and deposit the money and you can do it for free, even with the main competitor the Monza has Starlin. You can use the eleven thousand or, however many there are post office, branches and deposit cash into your bank account for free. So the fact that they think it is a perk that somebody should be paying for seems absolutely ludicrous, seeing as they're pretty much the only big major established bank in this country, where you can't already do it for free.

Now. The other big thing that they are advertising as part of this product is the fact that you can now integrate a bunch of other bank accounts and credit cards and have them shown within your munzo app, so they're, making use of PSD to and open banking to Be able to draw your various transactions balances all of that information, your munzo app, so that then you can view it now. The problem here is that I don't see what the value is for the customer to actually go ahead, and do that sure you can see all your transactions, but there is absolutely no benefit. There is no value.

There is no incremental win for the customer other than maybe saving time and opening another app, but the problem is with most of these. You don't really care. You know if you have a credit card that you don't really use or that you repay in full. Do you actively go and check it every single day to go and check the balance of the transactions? You probably don't once you have given the permission for the account data from wherever else you have a card with to be shown within your munzo app.

You then have to go and renew it every three months, and why would somebody bother doing all of that? If there's absolutely no financial benefit, there is no incentive. The only thing it does give is. It gives munzo a bunch of information and data which might allow them to lend you money when they think they might be able to make some money on it. When they see that you carry a balance somewhere else, they might go and make you office so that you move that balance to them.

So the only benefit here is a commercial benefit to Monza. I'm really not seeing it. I'm really not seeing why you would go ahead and use it. They're hardly gon na be objective.

They're not gon na be like some of the independent third-party services which, although they do make money on training in this data, they do try to show you a very wide range of different providers where you might be able to save here. They're not gon na be telling you to go and move your services or take a loan or take a credit card with somebody else. They're only wanting to draw money in from other people. So why will the customer actively want to do that? The moment they actually understand why they're being asked for this information, the next perk of being able to get a munzo plus account.

In fact, you don't even need a Monza Plus account do this is the ability to smash like button for each of algorithm. It is incredibly important, please go ahead and do it and really appreciated it, takes me quite a while to go and produce these videos go and dig into the details. Read all the terms conditions and tell you what the important parts are and thank you very much. I really appreciate it.

Let's move on now: let's talk about one feature: the mon-sol is focusing a lot of attention on and they think it's very important, and that is these virtual. So now what that feature gives you is the ability to, within your app open, multiple different cards, which you can use to pay for various online services separately. So what this means is your main card can be used for your regular everyday purchases. You might open one for some online subscriptions.

You might use a third one for some other purchases, but the issue here is: it just makes everything now much more complicated and what they're saying is they don't trust their own fraud prevention systems and their own ability to detect fraudulent transactions? So they're trying to tell you that you can open other cards to try to minimize that risk for the average user. This is incredibly difficult, so you have to manage different card numbers. So if you go and close one and that has various transactions, then suddenly you have to use one of your other cars to go manage it again. It adds a lot of complexity.

It adds a lot of things that customers can do, but from the average everyday user perspective there is no actual incremental value. It doesn't make your life in any way easier. It doesn't really simplify things. If anything, it makes things more complicated and sure you can use various different fake cards that live within your app, that you don't even get a plastic card for again pay for different things, but why the whole thing just seems so unnecessary and so complicated.

It kind of sounds like somebody in the development team came up with the idea, and the whole company just went with it, because everyone's so technologically minded nobody kind of thought. Who is this actually for like what is the actual use case in which customers would actively want to have five different card numbers to manage? Have payments go into different accounts and having to move money and ID it it? Just it's just it's just not necessary. It really is not necessary if people wanted it, people would talk about it, but you know what the number of times they've seen people ask to have. Five different cards for the same car bank account is like zero next on the list of features is the ability to automatically export your data to Google sheets now I know I'm a big advocate of budgeting, I'm a big advocate of people being able to plan financially And being smart with managing and money, but the issue here is twofold: first, you can already export transactions.

You can only get things. This just allows you to do this automatically. It allows you to link the data through so that when you open your Google sheets or your transaction data is already in there, except when you're trying to claim that you are app only you don't even have a website way of accessing the account everything is within The app are you saying that people should stop using this app and instead go and manage their account by looking at their Google sheets again. This probably affects something like no point, not 1 % of the user base.

I mean, maybe it's higher. Maybe it's not point. Not 2 % of the user base and it's such a specific request because it probably saves the customers, like, I don't know it 2 or 3 seconds a month being able to hit that export button and pasting it into their Google sheets. If that's what they want to do, it seems like a really weird and really odd feature to make one of your 10 big differences between this account and the one you don't have to pay for, but hey they're, probably running a little short on some of the Benefits next, mr.

perks is the ability to view and monitor your credit score and that's great, except for the fact that the credit score that they're going to be showing you is absolutely pointless. Nobody uses it. It's not used in any kind of credit evaluation. It's just a number that a credit reference agency is made up and therefore is actually of no real value, and second, you can already go and view the credit score from every single credit reference agency out there for free.

There are services for Experian and a services for Equifax, and there are services for TransUnion used to be called credit, where you can view the credit score, and you can view all the other information about your accounts, these guys hold for free. So how is it that this perk is listed as one of the things that is worth the 5 pounds a month when you can literally go and get exactly the same thing for free somewhere else? Last on the list is the ability to create custom categories for your transactions so rather than using one of the preset ones, one of the default ones. You can now go and create a whole bunch of new categories, so you can micromanage your spending in a slightly more detailed way. I mean again, I love managing finances and being good with it, but come on really so.

The total costs of this account per year is 60 pounds. The only perk under the list of perks have just mentioned that actually has any real value so stuff. That is unique that you can't get for free or the at least the same somewhere else is the 1 % on your deposits and that 1 % amounts to a maximum a maximum of 20 pounds a month. Yeah, I'm not seeing it.

The big issue here is banking has figured out over a long period of time. A sustainable business model that works exceptionally well and the business model works. Something like this. You take deposits from some people and you pay them a small amount of interest for the privilege of keeping their deposit money with you.

You then lend them money out to other people and hopefully the some of the interest, fees and charges and whatever from those people. The risk ie the people who end up not paying their debt, hopefully that amount of money that you collect over here is gon na, be more the one you have to pay out over there, and that difference is the amount of money that you make now. This banking system has worked for, like literally tens of thousands of years. That's that's exactly how people have deposited and borrowed any form of value for a long period of time, and yet today the banks continue trying to figure a very different approach that just doesn't work today.

It seems appropriate to try to charge people for depositing money instead of paying them to do so now. Here the model is even more weird they're trying to tell you they're gon na pay you for it, but they're gon na charge, you more for the privilege of you being able to be paid for the money that you've deposited. Did I get that right chart whatever you probably didn't, remember this, but about 10 years ago there was a massive scandal about packaged bank accounts. A lot of customers got massive refunds dating back months and years, because banks were seen to miss, sell these and the problem there was.

There was a bunch of features within these package accounts, but customers didn't really need or want. A bunch of these features had no real value, and yet they were bundled in under the pretense that they were part of the overall value package. They said that some of the components like the insurance didn't actually give customers anything and the value that insurance was very negligible, because if they didn't cover most of the instances, the customers thought it covered. Does that ring any bells, because we're literally talking about a new wave of packaged bank accounts where you getting a bunch of stuff that has realvalue, because you can get exactly the same thing for free somewhere else or is actually not of particular value? To most of the customers, who probably won't use some of these features, it just seems incredible that this is where we're at, because we're kind of repeating history.

Here, at the end of the day, maybe I will be proven wrong. Maybe hordes of Monza customers are gon na line up waiting to pay the five pounds a month in order to be able to get a slightly different colored card and be able to make use of these perks. Maybe I am completely misunderstanding. The situation, if you think I am make sure you leave a comment below I'd love, to hear your thoughts if your monster customer you're gon na be signing up for this offer, please make sure you do leave a comment below I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Just a quick note: if you do sign up for this account, you can cancel within the first 14 days. But if you don't, you then have to keep the account for a minimum of three months. So they are so concerned about people leaving that they are actually locking you in until the three month period ends, by which point you will pay the whole 15 pounds for the account that you no longer want. So if that doesn't sound like a warning to you, I don't know what is, I hope you guys found this video useful and enjoyed it.

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