"Long says she doesn’t see how Monzo can become profitable without a “radical change” to its business model."<p>In the article they allude to Monzo not doing much (enough?) lending, such as offering mortgages or credit cards.<p>This is a very interesting point about what a bank is supposed to be. Starting to sound like that's all a bank can do to become profitable (this is obviously not true, data-mining customer purchasing behaviour has to be a really strong option as well), but that's not my main point. The main point is that Monzo, at least initially, lead with an extremely attractive, mobile-focused, well-designed online experience. They had the 'hip'-factor going for them (I vividly remember, while working at various advertising agencies, how suddenly everyone had the bright-neon-orange debit cards).<p>Later they also had a reputation for being crypto-friendly, which made a lot of my techie friends get an account with them, after the horror-stories of other banks just closing people's accounts for trading crypto.<p>But it would appear that customer numbers and a modern attitude alone are not enough to make a bank profitable.<p>Some more random tidbits: Here is a talk on Go microservices architecture by Matt Heath <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiCru2zIWWs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiCru2zIWWs</a><p>I think this may have been hotly debated on HN as well. It seems they are running well over 1,000 Go-backed microservices these days. This is just staggering. My little project is at a grand total of 4, and I find I spend enough time on interop, to have almost considered monolithing the whole thing again.<p>And a last one, for a chuckle, here's Halifax's (then) design agency using Monzo assets in a Halifax design deck, presumably because Halifax wanted to modernise their offering and 'be like Monzo': <a href="https://www.thedrum.com/news/2019/04/15/monzo-clashes-with-halifax-bank-over-embarrassing-app-design-likeness" rel="nofollow">https://www.thedrum.com/news/2019/04/15/monzo-clashes-with-h...</a>
It is rather baffling why they haven't produced products that would traditionally make a ton of money, like a credit card or SIPP. I hope they succeed though. The traditional banking sector sucks.