TS Anil, CEO @Monzo: From Layoffs, Downrounds and Low Employee NPS, To $1BN in Revenue | E1254

What does that look like in terms of how Monzo fundamentally makes money?

A third is transaction-based revenues, interchange FX and so on. A third is on-balance-sheet lending, when customers take out an unsecured borrowing product from us, a loan or an overdraft, or Monzo Flex. And then the last one-third is what I describe as good fees. And I say good fees because this is not stuff we make money when customers make mistakes. It's not gotcha fees. These are fees like subscriptions, when someone takes out a subscription product from us, or on the marketplace if they original mortgage in the future. It includes the interest margin that we make on the savings product.

Ready to go? TS, I'm so excited for this. Listen, I've spoken to most of your cap table in preparation for the show, so thank you so much for joining me.

Just waiting to be asked.

Ah.

Excited to be here, Harry.

Listen, we've had it in the calendar for a while. Now, I wanna start with, when you took over, it was, it was a tough time. There was a 40% down round, there was little runway, there was high engineering attrition, there was low employee NPS. It was tough. And also, you're in the US. Why did you decide to take on the challenge?

You know, to answer that, we're gonna have to back up a little bit, um, Harry, back up because, as you know, I've spent many years in different sorts of financial services companies and banks around the world. And through it all, I had this big unscratched itch of really thinking that someone needed to reinvent the sector, someone needed to reinvent how customers and money worked with each other. And in the bigger places I had worked, I'd tried to do it, right? But it was clear that the legacy players were never gonna fix it, right? For the, with the best of intent and the best of, of, uh, wanting to do it, it was never gonna get fixed by incumbents, right? And the, the history of incumbents transforming their industries is anyways very, very sketchy. And for all of the obvious reasons of legacy tech and legacy mindset and business models to protect, and this and that and the other. So it had been a thing for me for the longest time, so it wasn't an accident that I ended up in the conversation with Monzo in the first place, because I'd been seeking to do that thing, be a part of a team that was gonna change the sector for- uh, forever and ever. So that commitment and belief in the mission was very real for me. So encountering what Monzo was, um, when I started, of course, you've talked about all of the s- you know, all of the things, um, that were, were wrong or broken or difficult, but if I looked at the hand I had to play, there were some good cards in that hand. We had found a magical product market fit with our initial current account product. We'd found a brand and a tone of voice that had really resonated across the country. So in addition to that, all of those problems you talked about were real, right? We were running out of capital and there was, um, COVID on, our revenues had, had fallen off of a cliff, monetization was lagging the user growth. So every version of problem that you can think of, we certainly had that as well. But if I looked at the full hand, this was one I wanted to play. And I guess at a, at a deeper level, I've never been shy to run towards the fire. Never been one to sort of balk because it feels difficult. If anything, it feels more like, "Yeah, I'm gonna give this a swing," right? "And, uh, I'm gonna give everyth- give it everything I've got. And it won't fail because of something I did not do." That's it, there's a deep sense of like, "I'm gonna try and make this work."