After GoCardless, he served as chief technical officer at Starling Bank, now a competitor – which he left to found Monzo. It had to change its name from Mondo following a copyright boo-boo, and it was losing money. “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. Earlier this year it raised £113m from a Californian investment group, which doubled its value to £2bn. It’s not only 20-somethings who have money issues after all. While Monzo is a experiencing fast growth, the health of the European fintech ecosystem has also helped its progress. Startup bank Monzo is doing away with one of its most popular features — unlimited free ATM withdrawals overseas. What is the account balance of the founder and CEO of the fastest growing bank in the country? While the breakup is still raw, it was unsurprising in hindsight. His girlfriend, Hannah-Polly Williams, works for the refugee charity International Rescue Committee. In two days in March 2017 it raised £22m, breaking crowdfunding records on Crowdcube. 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 … “My own payday?” He is aghast. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. “Why should anyone not know what anyone else is paid? Blomfield worked at Starling before leaving to found Monzo. 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. This piece was amended on 15 August 2019 to correct a quotation. Tom Blomfield, 34, is the CEO of Monzo. 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? A more recent iteration is the “locked pot”, which prevents users from accessing those savings for a year, if they choose. “The idea is that we become the kind of storefront for everything. “I worry that we’ve not got the winning model yet,” he says. For two years, Blomfield has lived in his Hoxton home with his girlfriend, who works for a charity, and two friends. But legacy banks aren’t standing still. “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. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. Presumably he can bring his own payday forward. They can’t understand it. 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. And a new strategy has emerged. That is the “shiny new toy”, but Blomfield is trying not to be too distracted by it for the moment. Similarly, incumbents have started allowing online customers to track when and where they spend their money using Google maps. 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. Monzo founder Tom Blomfield, left, and Starling founder Anne Boden. Maybe control is more important to us than choice. Blomfield hopes to reach 3m customers by the end of the year. Monzo was a bank that lived on your phone. The last financial crisis was all about credit risk and liquidity, he warns – essential banking problems. At the time, Monzo’s numbers were impressive. Red alert: Lily Allen tweeted how much she loved her card. Less than you might imagine. Given the precarity of modern employment, it is no wonder more of us are being mindful about our money. (The staff is around 65% men.) 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. – Why does the London Tube still not have Wi-Fi in tunnels? His girlfriend, Ms Hannah-Polly Williams, works in fundraising for the refugee charity International … You can see why civil liberties campaigners might be concerned: imagine if Universal Credit were contingent on cigarette consumption. If Monzo really is transitioning from startup to bank, there are bank-sized questions to ask. If it becomes the size of Lloyds, or Deutsche Bank, what is to stop it behaving like other banks that size? And the amount of money that you need to survive in San Francisco is insanity! His downtime is spent playing Starcraft or cooking with his girlfriend. Monzo office dog Bingo with chief executive Tom Blomfield. Read more: Monzo review: an elegant way to manage your money. But then Monzo is no ordinary bank. I’m surprised more companies don’t do that, to be honest.”. But for the individual who struggles with impulse control in the face of societal pressure to spend, it’s quite appealing. Transactions at bookmakers are stopped before money leaves the account; Blomfield is certain that traditional banks will soon copy this move, too. There are regulations to comply with, staff to hire, and the small matter of disrupting the banking sector in the US. 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 Back then, in 2015, the coral-coloured card was especially popular with travellers, as it offered free cash withdrawals abroad. 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?”. The bank still loses money – it has 1,000 staff, and counting – but Blomfield insists profitability is on the horizon. 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. He founded his first company, Boso.com, when he was 21, but failed to raise any money. 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. Monzo hopes to have 3m customers by the end of 2019 – not just millennials but their parents, too. If I could go home and flick a switch and not think about Monzo, it would be great.”. So what is on his mind at 3am? 685 Followers, 458 Following, 195 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Tom Blomfield (@tom_blomfield) It’s the most stable he’s been for a while. I worked in consulting before and we worked 70 hours a week as standard. The app’s interface, which was attractive and easy-to-read, promised, gratifyingly, a kind of control. I typically get up after 8am, I love to sleep,” laughs Blomfield as he sits in his Finsbury Square office. 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. Liam Kelly. “I probably work 40 hours a week. It is officially a “fintech unicorn”, one of the rare British startups to be valued at over £1bn. https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/politics/article/50-most-influential-britain-2020 Monzo stressed that no fraud had taken place, but clearly, it might have. “It's like, come on. Can we as a company put a set of rules in place that mean in the future we can’t break those rules? … One typical headline of the time read: “Digital bank Monzo’s losses more than quadruple.”. “It’s lost its magic,” he says. He’s just back from his latest trip to Silicon Valley, and he wasn’t impressed. How about you try to leave the world a little better than you found it?”. 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. If that means revealing all in the process, he’s fine with it. 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. They certainly don’t lean over to show you their current balance, mid-conversation. Tom Blomfield was not prepared for the stress that the Covid-19 crisis would unleash on the banking sector and his own mental health. In the Sunday Times piece, Blomfield is described brooding over a girlfriend, torpedoing investment meetings, and failing to properly cater a Sunday roast. “And I knew if I failed, I could just go live in my parents’ garage.”. Recently, the company raised more than £200m in funding and plans to expand into the US. His friends are doctors, teachers, builders, lawyers, musicians. “You’re actually reducing someone’s optionality there. “One problem is this myopic bubble culture. Blomfield accepts the comparison, “But they need to keep persuading people to come back to the site each year,” he says. 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