Hello hello, been a while since I did an Update what with one thing or another. Mind you, normally this time of year I’m off for an extended break to practice my wine drinking in France, but life has a way of intervening and so instead I got a week in Wales. And not, as I’ve been informed, real Wales but “Scouse Wales”. I’m not sure what residents of the Llyn Peninsula would think of that, but to be fair most of the ones I met were actually Scousers so there’s probably something in it. Did you know that you can get to New York slightly quicker than driving to Abersoch from Edinburgh? You do now. 

Quite a lot going on at the moment; all the news is happening before the English go off on their holidays; us canny Scots as ever get in a month earlier for cheap hols though to be honest if you’re only going to Scouse Wales there isn’t all that much benefit. AND I didn’t get to go to the Back to the Beginning gig at Villa Park to see Ozzy’s retirement. Bah. 

Much of the news is about targeted support which at my age I imagine to be about something to help my joints, but I’m going to pass over that even though it fits in so nicely with our Advice Gap report launch from a few weeks ago.  

Instead let’s rest our Hard Stare upon challenger bank Monzo who has felt the ire of the regulator this week for failings around customer identification and validation. This has cost them a cheeky £21m in fines, not to mention all the work that’s needing done to fix all the things that aren’t good enough. 

You can read the FCA notice for Monzo here. What I love about this (and hat tip to Mr Michael Barrett for pointing it out) is the sheer dry wit of whoever wrote the Notice. My favourite part is where the FCA had got Monzo to agree to put measures in place to not take on any high-risk customers until it had sorted its anti-money-laundering procedures (AML).  Monzo did agree to this, but you know how sometimes you say “yeah no problem” but you’re not really paying attention? Sort of like “yeah of course I’ll put the bins out before you’re back, babe”? And then you hear the key in the lock and suddenly you’re like “oh, probably should have structured my evening differently”? This is sort of like that, except instead of onboarding zero high risk customers, Monzo onboarded 34,000 or so. I mean, it’s an easy mistake to make, and “zero” and “fewer than 35,000” do sound quite similar… 

This is fun, and so are the financial crime breaches, and so is the fact that various clients gave 10 Downing Street, Big Ben and various other LOLworthy addresses for their accounts and were still approved. It’s all good knockabout stuff, and of course it will now be fixed. 

But the real point behind it is this. I have sat through – as I’m sure you have – a million presentations where various folk have said “challenger banks can teach the rest of the industry a huge lesson in customer experience”. I know I’ve heard this said by advisers and techy folk and others about platforms, and I’m sure it’s true for many other bits and bobs. 

And it’s true. Monzo’s onboarding for new clients (I have an account; the address for it is in Brig O’Doon but that didn’t seem to be an issue) is awesome. So easy. Flies through. The way it should be. Right? 

Yeeeahhhhh – but what made it that slick was that Monzo was doing less work than other institutions who aren’t being slapped with massive fines. The process was better not because it was better but because it was shorter. And it was shorter because it didn’t do the work required. And the downstream effects of that have to do with scams and crime and all sorts of things we Do Not Love. 

I like my Monzo account and I don’t think they’re evil, by the way. They’re just trying to make things easy for legit customers, and they’ve done that brilliantly. The problem is that not everyone is legit, but everyone goes through the same process. 

There’s no doubt that the industry, and the long-term savings and investment part of it in particular, is hidebound by old practice, aye-been merchants, legacy systems and all the rest of it. But there is such a thing as too quick; too easy. It’s good to be quick; it’s more important to be safe. The question we need to get the answer to is this: how can we get radically quicker without getting rid of the stuff that actually matters?   

Anyway. If anyone wants me I’ll be at my second home waiting for my new card to arrive. The address? Oh, it’s Murrayfield Stadium, Murrayfield, Edinburgh. And I’ll be funding my account from the proceeds of the sale of the Forth Road Bridge which I recently disposed of to a nice American gentleman.

And your music choice – well, in honour of long drives and all those who undertake them, and also in honour of the retirement at least in his Sabbathy form of the Prince of Darkness, I think we should have Road To Nowhere by Ozzy Osbourne.  Is it a cover of the Talking Heads classic, a copy of which I picked up in Cob Records in Porthmadog? You’ll have to click the link to find out…