The author gets cranky and identifies a random weekday in August 2020 as the day the music died for Monzo.

Monzo has long been the most promising of the UK challenger banks for me - I first wrote about them here in 2016, and I've been a current account customer since they launched it (not just a secondary account, either - my salary gets paid into it).

Lately, though, I've been increasingly feeling that Monzo have served their purpose: I can't name a single feature they've added in the last eighteen months which has made life better for me (what on earth are all those developers doing all day?), and their existence has now forced all the "legacy" banks to overhaul their IT and start cloning all the features Monzo had first.

Meanwhile, they chickened out of implementing pay-in-a-cheque-by-photographing it (only a minor annoyance to me, but their reasoning felt disingenous: they said a only tiny fraction of their customers had ever paid in a cheque. No wonder, when you have to post it and wait ages for it to clear!)

Most recently, and what may be the last straw for me: the really useful feature of being able to see the sender's bank details when someone sends you money has been withdrawn with no explanation (apart from some vague waffle about privacy). This was really handy for all sorts of reasons, and would have been doubly so for business accounts (if they ever got round to lanching those for charities, which I do the money for several of!)

Oh, and there's still no Samsung Pay support.

Next time Monzo puts a foot wrong, I'm likely to give up and switch back to one of the high street banks. A real shame, but when the challenger stops challenging, it's just another bank.