10 ways Monzo is like EvE Online

Many years ago i fell in love with an online MMO space trading game called Eve Online.

I played for probably 4 hours a week, but i spent dozens more hours interacting with the amazing community that built up around it. I had the privilege of founding the /r/eve subreddit and watching it grow to 66k people, and made many friends, online and at meetups and in London and Iceland.

Monzo right now feels like EvE in the early years, a small team of people surrounded by a fantastic community who are much much more than just customers. There’s other similarities as well.. The open events at our office, the API, the appeal to a similar core audience of technically minded people.

So here’s a look at my top ten ways Monzo is like EvE Online.

1/ Office parties

Beers in the Monzo Courtyard

A couple of years after i started playing eve (i’m going to stop typing EvE because it’s annoying)… Anyway a couple of years after i started playing eve, CCP (the makers) basically decided to invite the entire fan base to come to iceland and hang out for a few days. They called it FanFest, and it started small, but quickly grew into a huge annual event. I went twice, it was amazing. Talking to the developers at the second one, they told me that when they first decided to do it they thought no one would come.

At Monzo we had a similar experience, we’ve now held dozens of events, but it still amazes me that people are willing to give up their time to come and hang out with (and drink beer with) their bank.

2/ Appeals to techies

Nerds, Geeks, Hipsters, Early adopters.. When every you start something, by definition, you have zero fans. The first people you appeal to are going to, again, by definition, the early adopters. For both eve, and monzo, that’s meant a bias towards 20–40 y.o. males. As Monzo grows it’s broadening back out, and as we want to build a bank that appeals to everyone, that something we’re happy to encourage.

3/ The API

MMO’s, and indeed legacy banks, have traditionally had troubled relationships with third parties.. Banks have feared losing control of their customers to aggregators, and MMO’s have worried about sites profiting from their work, by either automation (gold farming) or by nullifying the information asymmetry that’s built into the game ( Like World of Warcraft and Thottbott, or Pokemon Go and Pokevision.)

CCP took a different approach, they opened up an API, and used the services that built up around that API to make the game so much more. It’s amazing to be able to check your eve mail on your phone, or automatically update spreadsheets with your trades.

The Big Eve corps (with thousands of users, many of whom are developers themselves) have whole systems built with Single-Sign-On, predictive budgets, automatic refunding of ships lost in battle and more, all built on the API.

Monzo believe in the power of an ecosystem built around an API. We’ve already seen amazing tools being built on the API, things like TFL integration, Amazon Alexa skills and direct integration with budgeting tools.

4/ Forums

Monzos community forum is amazing, and like Eves, most of the communication is between users. For those of us that work at Monzo, its incredible to be able to jump on there and get instant feedback on proposed design changes, or gauge how the community feels about what we’re building. The value of rapid, honest feed back for a startup can’t be over stated. So far theres been a lot less drama on the Monzo forum, but that’s probably because we’re making a bank, not a game about internet spaceships.

Monzos forums are so popular in-fact that staff from some other challenger banks have been known to hang out there.

5/ The Tweetfleet

The 20,000 people who follow @monzo on twitter carry the monzo story between communities, and it’s amazing to see them suggesting monzo to each other, or helping their friends with monzo related questions. I’m sort of jealous Monzo doesn’t have a stable hash tag like #tweetfleet

6/ Comms

Slack and Emojis have changed the world. If you’re living in Email and corporate land you might not have noticed yet. At Monzo, literally every status email is full of emoji, our slack channel is full of gifs and reactions. Here’s what slack looked like when we found out we were a bank..

Monzo is slowly evolving it’s own internal language, you start to see the same reaction gifs used and it adds to the sense of being one team.

Eve went through the same process, things like “X-ing up”, literally posting X in a channel so that you could be added to a fleet became part of the common lore.

7/ Transparent roadmap

The best forum posts in Eve land were always the Dev posts. “Here’s what we’re changing” or “here’s what we’re thinking about”. There’s something incredibly powerful about being open with your plans. No matter how much you think you know how people use your product, someone will always come along and point out why there’s a better way, or something you haven’t thought of. Monzos transparent roadmap is online and there’s regularly Sneak Peeks on the forum with early screenshots of features in progress.

8/ The logs show nothing..

Ok, we’re nearing the end of the list, and i’m starting to come to the things where Monzo and Eve are diverging.. I’m happy to say Monzo’s logs are amazing. Because we started with Microservices, we knew there was never any way we could “jump on a box and check the logs”, so Oliver Beattie, our Head of Engineering wrote a tool called SLog (structured logging) that aggregates all logs from all services and correlates them in real time. It’s amazing, once you have a traceid, from any service or error message, you can trace the flow of that request all the way through the stack.

9/ GMs

In EvE, like many MMOs if you get stuck of have an issue with the game, you can page a GM, or Game Master to come and help you out or fix the bug you’re having. This sense of immediacy and satisfaction is what we wanted to achieve with our in-app customer service.

Literally no one in the world wants to spend 15 minutes waiting on hold, listening to the same loop of a song over and over, to then have to answer a bunch of obscure questions just in order to talk to your bank.

With Monzo, you just tap a button, and a few minutes later, you’re connected to a real human, sitting in the same room as the developers, and the CEO.

10/ CSM — The Council of Stellar Management.

This is something that EvE has the Monzo doesn’t yet have. The CSM is a collection of players, elected each year to act as the players representatives to CCP. It’s their job to represent the concerns and feed back of the users.

It’s a good way of getting feedback, and allows CCP to share with a small number of users things which have to stay confidential for some reason.

Monzo has regular feedback sessions where we invite 10–20 users into the office and get their feedback on features that we’re building, but i wonder if eventually we might have designated community members, elected by our users to help us make decisions, perhaps on where to ethically invest our customers funds.

Anyway, That’s my 10 things Monzo can learn from EvE online. If you’ve got to the bottom and want to sign up for Monzo, head over to https://monzo.com or to give Eve Online a go to https://www.eveonline.com/