Monzo Magic hackathon: 3 days, 120 ideas, 333 Monzonauts

This August, as we were wrapping up the summer, Monzonauts across the business set out to learn from each other, have fun and build things centred around one theme: Monzo Magic.

It was a way to get out of the routine, let imagination flow, alongside peers that you may not get a chance to work with often. This activity is commonly referred to in the industry as a hackathon and Monzonauts enjoyed it:

“I loved working on new projects, and domains I'm not familiar with.”

“It was SO much fun. It reminded me why I love my job, and I was inspired by all the things that we built.”

We believe that magic moments can come from small interactions, just as much as from bigger features. From the early days, we wanted to enable Monzonauts to bring their ideas to the table and build delightful moments for our customers. We used to get together every month for Monzo Time, and you can read more about it in this post. 

A lot of great things came out of these Monzo Time efforts: from transaction emojis, to blocking gambling transactions, to viewing your card’s CVC in app and many more.

With an ever growing company, we acknowledged the impact Monzo Time had over the years, and we wanted everyone to feel they have the time and space to innovate together. As a result, Monzonauts across all departments took part in a three day ‘Monzo Magic’ hackathon.

Once we announced the hackathon during one of our monthly Tech All hands, we opened up a board for people to list their ideas. There was so much enthusiasm, that almost half of the total ideas were put down in the first hour. The topics ranged in between end user journeys, improving the lives of our Customer Operations team, or enhanced experiences for Monzonauts in their day to day work.

When it comes to logistics, people who participated in the hackathon fully dedicated the three days to the hackathon, and deprioritised other business work.

We encouraged folks to choose an idea they are passionate about, to create teams with Monzonauts they might not often work with and to have fun. An important outcome of this was learning from others, creating new connections and expanding our horizons.

Teams showcased their work via demos which were revealed in a big get together, where we  celebrated the success of the hackathon. Monzonauts also voted for best hacks and we had lots of prizes, including the extremely sought after Monzo plushies!

As next steps we looked at all the projects and categorised them into: shipping as soon as possible, iterating over in the short term, and considering for the longer term roadmaps. We will be posting updates about them as we launch, but there are two examples we want to showcase now.

This is one idea which you may have already spotted as it’s been live for a few weeks! You can use biometrics–such as fingerprint on Android and Touch ID and Face ID on iOS–instead of entering your PIN when making payments in the Monzo app.

However, the setting is difficult to find, and so we found that many customers haven’t turned it on. We want to encourage customers to turn on biometrics as they’re quicker and more convenient than entering your PIN, as well as being more secure. With biometrics enabled, you can also reveal your PIN in the app in seconds. 

To make enabling biometrics as simple as possible, we decided to give customers the option whilst they were already entering their PIN for something else. What you used to have to search for within Settings, could now be done with a single tap!

We’ve been gradually rolling this out since the hackathon and the results have been great. To date, we’ve tripled the number of customers using biometrics, with more to come!

The US-based product squad prototyped US joint accounts during the hackathon. After over 10,000 lines of backend and mobile code written in 3 days, we had fully functioning US joint accounts in staging. We also built a US-specific joint account signup flow that allows two existing US users to create a joint account together. 

After the hackathon, we productionized the code, drew up the user terms and conditions, and created a go-to-market plan. We’re planning to launch a US Joint Account beta program with real users in December 2022 and planning to do a full launch in early 2023!

As with anything else, learning and continuous improvement is a key part of the process. The feedback provided by Monzonauts after the event is a great input for what can go even better next time. It’s also a testimony of how much people enjoy building projects that bring customer value.

If you want to also be part of the process, we are hiring!