TS Anil on Monzo’s Turnaround, Product Strategy and Global Ambitions

Monzo CEO TS Anil describes a bank that faced simultaneous funding, product and control problems when he took over. In this January 2025 interview with Harry Stebbings, he explains how the team approached the turnaround, how Monzo earns revenue and why he wants to build a broader financial platform. His assessments and ambitions reflect his role at Monzo.

Anil had spent years in financial services and wanted to help reinvent the relationship between people and their money. He believed incumbent banks faced obstacles from legacy technology, existing business models and established ways of thinking. That conviction drew him to Monzo despite the difficulties.

He says Monzo already had a current account customers loved and a distinctive brand. But the company had limited capital, revenue had fallen during the pandemic and monetization lagged user growth. The opportunity and the problems were both real.

There was no single lever that could solve the situation. Investors needed product momentum; shipping required regulatory trust; trust required stronger controls; and all of it depended on people. The team created a 100-day plan and worked on the interlocking problems together, hoping progress in one area would help the others.

Stebbings asks whether having a banking license slows product development. Anil says a regulated company must build the capability to operate safely at scale along with its technology and product. He believes getting those controls right early helped earn customer trust, while acknowledging that the sequencing can be debated.

Anil says Monzo chose not to offer broad cryptocurrency trading at the time because simply letting customers buy many assets for a fee did not fit its mission. Stebbings challenges the decision as potentially paternalistic; Anil responds that he wants customers to have information and tools to make informed choices.

He says the intention is eventually to offer a range of investment options, with sequencing based on customer needs and readiness. Monzo began with funds and an entry point as low as £1, alongside educational material; future products were plans rather than confirmed launches.

The wider ambition is to bring spending, saving, borrowing, insurance and investing into one place. Priorities depend on customer demand, operational readiness and the economics of each product.

For mortgages, Anil says he does not expect Monzo to fund the assets on its own balance sheet. Instead he wants to improve the customer journey and originate mortgages for other lenders, earning fees without deploying Monzo’s capital to hold the loan. That is a strategy, not a guarantee of a particular margin.

Not every feature has to generate revenue directly. He describes a gambling block developed after a customer service interaction: users can block transactions and face a 24-hour cooling-off period before removing the block. He says more than 600,000 customers had enabled it at the time.

Anil rejects a choice between mission and commercial performance. In his account, a product that earns trust can grow through recommendations and support other services. He reports more than 200,000 new users per month, mostly through word of mouth; the interview does not independently verify that attribution.

He would like Monzo to become a customer’s main bank, but is also willing for someone to try a narrow feature first. He argues that a broader relationship lets the app connect information across financial needs, though a customer can also generate meaningful revenue without making it their primary account.

Anil gives an approximate retail average revenue per user of £145 and compares it with higher figures at traditional banks with more mortgage revenue. The interview does not clearly establish a common accounting period or a like-for-like risk and capital adjustment, so these figures should not be used as a direct profitability comparison.

He says Monzo was targeting a roughly three-way revenue mix: transaction revenue such as interchange and foreign exchange; unsecured balance-sheet lending such as loans, overdrafts and Monzo Flex; and subscriptions, marketplace fees and savings interest margin. These are broad categories and targets described at the time, not a detailed financial statement.

Anil points to energy switching as a product the company closed after market conditions changed. The lesson, he says, is to stay close to customer problems, iterate and adjust when the market changes, rather than assume a logical extension will always work.

To increase product velocity, he focused on a few priorities and worked across time horizons. The team aimed to ship some products in weeks while beginning longer projects early enough to deliver them several quarters later.

He recalls pushing a subscription product over the finish line in about four weeks in 2020. At the same time, the company paused and rebuilt parts of its lending business for scale, investing in underwriting, the customer journey and controls before relaunching.

He calls the gaps that arise when controls do not keep pace with growth “controls debt.” Just as product and technical debt require attention, a regulated bank must invest in the systems that support its expanding operations.

Regulatory work is part of running a bank, Anil says, much as warehouse logistics are part of running an e-commerce business. Leaders cannot expect to build at scale while treating the underlying operating requirements as someone else’s problem.

He defends alignment and empowerment despite the jargon: teams need a shared direction, and people closest to customers need authority to make decisions. He says early internal disagreements included whether Monzo was a technology company or a bank, a distinction he rejects.

Another debate concerned mission and monetization. He argues that a mission without a business plan is only a slogan, and that transparent fees for genuine value can support the mission. Giving away everything indefinitely while investors fund losses would not, in his view, create a durable business.

Looking ahead, Anil expects transaction-related revenue to remain important, but sees diversification as central to a financial platform serving many needs. That expectation is a business forecast, not a guarantee against credit or interest-rate cycles.

Monzo had more than ten million UK customers and roughly half a million small-business customers, according to the discussion. Anil says the company was developing a European strategy and working on a product for US customers; those expansion efforts were still underway.

He says Monzo withdrew an earlier US banking-license application when a license seemed unlikely, and was instead pursuing a partner-bank model. He believes US fintech has often grown through marketing spend or specialized products, leaving an opportunity to bring more services together.

The right US entry point remained under investigation. Anil identifies credit and adjacent products as plausible hypotheses because of customer demand and existing fintech models, but says the team had not yet reached a firm answer.

Ireland was selected as the intended regulatory base for European expansion, not because it was necessarily the largest target market. He says each country has different customer needs, and a high-engagement financial product cannot simply be copied without accounting for local differences.

Monzo defines engagement in terms of use, particularly weekly transacting activity, rather than time spent staring at a balance. Anil says a customer with an idle balance may generate revenue but does not count as an active user under that definition.

He links engagement with revenue per user and adoption of other products. As an example, he says 150,000 people joined a waiting list for investments after one press interview. He attributes that response to existing distribution and trust, a causal interpretation rather than a controlled experiment.

Anil disagrees with “build it and they will come.” A good product matters, he says, but a company also needs mechanisms that help customers discover and recommend it. Nor does he regard being first as sufficient: Monzo entered banking long after the sector was established.

On an IPO, he says Monzo had time and supportive investors and did not need to go public immediately. He sees potential benefits to the business, investors and brand, but says the reasons and timing still need consideration.

Asked about listing in London, Anil says it is too early to choose a venue. The UK is Monzo’s home market, but the company would watch changes in the market and make a decision when necessary. No IPO timing or location was announced in the interview.

He questions simplified debates about “founder mode.” Building a company at scale, he says, requires setting ambition and product vision, staying close to customer experience, and building the leadership and culture to execute. He compares it to needing all three disciplines in a triathlon.

As a non-founder CEO, he had to earn trust from a team and investors accustomed to seeing younger founders pitch a vision. He wanted to show that he could do more than stabilize the company and could help build a much larger business.

Anil says the first financing round after he joined was the hardest, including a down round and subsequent top-up. He recalls raising £250 million across that process. A lower valuation can affect morale, he says, so leaders need to explain the situation and maintain conviction about the business they are building.

He describes the latest $650 million round as easier because investors could see revenue growth and customer engagement in the business. His claims about relative monetization and retention are the company leader’s assessment, not independently benchmarked in the interview.

Anil hopes Monzo will become one of a small number of global companies that transform how people manage money. This is an ambition, not a forecast that the company will achieve global scale. He also acknowledges that a CEO can feel lonely even with a strong team around them.

The IPO remains an unmade decision about timing and location, he says, but not one that weighs on him daily. He admires Apple’s combination of design, functionality and trust, and worries about judgment without kindness and opinions without curiosity.

Taking the Monzo role from San Francisco during the pandemic meant starting work at two or three in the morning. He describes the period as a mixture of immediate enjoyment and difficult experiences that become meaningful stories only in retrospect.

Fundraising rejections felt personal, particularly when a potential investor had taken months to cultivate. He says the team kept pursuing the capital it needed and tried to see beyond each setback to the company they wanted to build.

Asked whether Monzo’s culture is too oriented toward work-life balance, Anil rejects a conflict between a values-led culture and high ambition. He believes inclusive teams that care about customers can work hard and produce strong results; that is his account of the culture, not an independent employee survey.

He credits the team, including co-founder and CTO Jonas and other leaders, for the progress made since the crisis. His ambition has grown with the company, but he likens execution to climbing: keep the summit in view while focusing on the next ledge.

Anil closes with music that moves him, including collaborations between Eddie Vedder and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan on the Dead Man Walking soundtrack. The discussion ends on the personal interests that sit alongside the demands of leading the company.