In November last year, we said we were starting to think about what business banking might look like for Monzo. Last month, Tom mentioned that we’ve included business accounts in our plans for 2019. This week, we’re excited to announce that we’re launching a small test of business accounts to 100 sole traders and limited companies!

If you’re as excited about this as we are, join our waiting list and you could be among the first people to open a Monzo Business Account. We hope we can open business accounts for even more businesses by the end of the year. If you’ve added your details then we’ll keep you up to date with our progress

Join the waiting list

We’ve heard your calls for business banking

As we said, early last month, Tom took to Twitter to ask: “What one thing would you add to Monzo in 2019 to make it (more) awesome?”

What one thing would you add to @monzo in 2019 to make it (more) awesome? — Tom Blomfield (@t_blom) January 8, 2019

You responded overwhelmingly with business accounts! And we weren’t surprised.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve spent lots of time talking to small business owners, reading your comments on the community forum, and understanding what you expect from a business account.

The perfect business account doesn’t exist (yet)

Your feedback made it clear that business banking is broken. Your existing business account isn’t meeting your needs.

You find it nearly impossible to open an account and way too difficult to understand all the different fees you pay. You didn’t start your business to spend your nights and weekends worrying about financial admin and expenses. You use so much software, so many different tools and systems that it’s hard to keep up.

The list goes on and on, but after speaking to over 200 of you, one thing is clear: your business is unique, and so are your needs.

You don’t belong in a bucket

Your business isn’t only defined by your turnover or your headcount. What you need from a bank account depends on where you are, and where you’re heading.

Maybe you’re small but growing fast. Maybe you’re small but happy to hold steady. Maybe you want sophisticated cash flow analysis. Maybe the thought of tax returns brings you out in a cold sweat.

We won’t lump you in a big bucket labelled small or medium-sized alongside businesses you’ve got nothing in common with. We want to offer you a set of features that solve the problems you’ve actually got, helping you to achieve your goals.

We want to become the financial hub for your business

We hear your problems, and want to build something that solves them. In the future, we want to become the financial hub for your business. One that grows with your business and connects seamlessly, simplifying your complex finances.

We want to offer you a set of features that solve the problems you’ve actually got, helping you to achieve your goals. We want to take away the hassle of financial management and empower you with information to better understand your business, manage your cash flow, and make better decisions.

This is the first step on a much longer journey

We know where we’d like to get to in the future, but we also know we have a long way to go. That’s why we’re starting small. We took a similar approach to this product as we have with others in the past. Based on everything we learned from our user research, we built an early version of our business accounts. Now, we’re launching it with 100 Monzo customers who also run a small business.

Our first 100 customers will be able to get started quickly, pay and get paid easily, manage their money, keep track of budgets and expenses, and more. But, we know some things won’t work perfectly, and we’re okay with that, as long as you are too.

We’re starting with a small test so that we can really understand how account features and our internal processes need to change before we can launch more broadly. We will work closely with our initial users to understand what problems we can actually solve, what works well, and what doesn’t work so well.

By building and testing an early version of our idea, we can plan for which features to update and which ones to prioritise next. We will be able to build out a team to support business accounts, and get one step closer toward our mission of making money work for everyone.

We’re still applying for some funding to help get us there faster

If you read our first post on business banking, you know that we are applying for some funding from the Alternative Remedies Package to help us build amazing accounts for small and medium businesses. Since then, we were selected to participate in the Incentivised Switching Scheme! That means once Monzo business accounts are available to most businesses, eligible RBS SME customers will be able to switch to Monzo and receive a switching bonus!

We’re still working on our application for the Capability and Innovation Fund. If we win, we’ll use the money to build on the findings from our test and launch business accounts to even more people sooner! If we don’t win, we’ll continue working on business accounts, but it may be a bit longer until we can release them to everyone.

Join the waiting list

In the future, we’d love to become the financial hub for every company in the world. For now, we’re starting small with a trial of 100 businesses, and then expand slowly.

If you’re interested in a Monzo Business Account, join our waiting list! Until we have something ready for everyone, keep letting us know what you’d like to see in your future business account - we’d love to hear from you!