How Monzo Nearly Went Bust and Became Profitable

okay welcome back to another episode of banking without borders so in july 2020 monzo published their annual accounts and buried on page 75 was a sentence that set off a chain reaction of events directors could not be certain the bank would still exist in 12 months there was significant doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern now it's important to say straight away that that is not a bankruptcy filing but the timing could hardly have been worse six weeks earlier investors devalued monzo from 2 billion to 1.25 billion pounds it was the middle of covid and funding had dried up and on the day those accounts were published sifted reported that customers were moving money out of monzo so the fear that they could go bust was genuine and justified because banks don't publish sentences like that by accident every word would have been agreed and signed off by the board so when a bank tells you In writing that it might not be here next year, you should probably believe it.

But how did this happen? How does the most talked about bank or digital bank in Britain with the hot coral card and the crowdfunding records end up printing a warning about its own survival? And what's even stranger, Look at them today.

This moment was clearly not fatal.

It was clearly just a blip, which means somewhere between then and now Monzo didn't just recover, they became a fundamentally different business.

So Jan, let's just start with how Monzo got into so much trouble in the first place.

What actually happened?