Premium payoff? Monzo reaches 135,000 paying subscribers

Monzo CEO TS Anil says the digital bank has reached over 135,000 paying subscribers in the roughly seven months since its paid banking services launched.

Monzo Plus, the £5/month subscription, debuted in July 2020 while its more expensive Monzo Premium, at £15/month, arrived in October 2020.

Speaking to The Sunday Times, Anil revealed that the two services have jointly hit this milestone, while Monzo’s business accounts, which launched last March and offer a £5/month Pro version, have now reached 80,000 accounts.

The figures are the first update since August 2020, when the bank reported 50,000 sign-ups for Plus in the first month after its launch.

UPDATE 14:00 - As

Anil also revealed in the interview that Monzo’s revenues are up 30 per cent from their pre-Covid levels and the bank is currently adding 100,000 UK customers a month.

The CEO says revenue is “diversified across three buckets,” including transaction payments, “good” fees (subscriptions and commissions), and lending, with the three “roughly equally weighted in terms of mindshare, focus and so on.”

Key takeaways

The full interview with Anil is worth a read, if only to get more flavour of the man leading Britain’s most high-profile digital bank, but it’s the figures he reveals that are most interesting.

Monzo’s subscription push has been absent from its annual results to-date—we don’t know how successsful or not it has been—but that will change in June-July when its next set of figures land.

Until then, the CEO’s comments are the best indication we have as to how the bank’s push into premium is going.

When it comes to business banking, 80,000 customers places Monzo a year or more behind Starling Bank and certainly double that for Tide when it comes to its absolute number of account holders, depending on the speed of growth.

For Plus and Premium, around 2.7 per cent of the bank’s customers are now signed up, making its subscriptions worth at least between £8.1m and £24m in annual recurring revenue (although it’s likely on the lower end of that spectrum given the mix of £5/£15 plans).

Given the two accounts have been on the market for less than a year Monzo is also still learning what the churn rate of customers leaving looks like, what features are drawing people in and which are being unused.