One thing I’ve noticed now that I have both Monzo and N26 is that Monzo has more features. It’s a better app and the user experience is better. Their budgeting tools are great, their focus on personalization wins, and the layout makes more sense. I like that and all that is great until you realize N26 is in 25 more countries than Monzo.
Most startups will face the ‘go wide or go deep’ problem with their market. Do you find your niche and perfect it, then move onto bigger markets, or do you get product market fit and scale, scale, scale?
Both of those views are generally accepted and it’s not easy to figure out what’s the right strategy . In the case of these two challenger banks both strategies have worked. Monzo is focused on slower growth with a deep feature rich UX and fostering community. N26 is aggressively going after an under served market across the world with a bare bones experience but good fundamentals. Who ends up winning?
In my experience it depends on what you want. When I first started out in mobile money I led a team that built a mobile wallet for a telekom company. We focused on up-selling and developing new features for the telekom firm and sacrificed scale. At the time, that worked for us. We made good money in a retainer and new fees. At Jumo, I led growth for loans in Tanzania and Zambia, expanded into Ghana and launched a saving product in Zambia as well. Our product was far more simple than at my first gig, but we served 50X the customers. Both products met their goals and helped increase the valuation of the business.
My point here is that a startup’s tradeoffs are more nuanced than appear to the user. Comparing two challenger banks UX experience doesn’t make sense if one has to operate across far more regulatory zones. What I would compare is the earnings, but unfortunately I don’t have those, so this is where the post ends.