Monzo

I've grown so much in my career and as a person at Monzo. It's been fantastic experience the journey Monzo has been on and the opportunities that growth has afforded me. Monzo's mission of making money work for everyone is still talked about and aligned around which is great after 4 years of it being our mission. It's great to see how well that mission has been sustained through wholesale change of the executive team, including the CEO and that it wasn't dependent on the founders sticking around.

Broadly Monzo hires smart, ambitious and decent people who make working here really enjoyable and some of the challenges easier to take. For me, coming to work with people I enjoy spending time with and I can learn from and be challenged by is very important for me in a job and that's definitely the case at Monzo. In engineering there's regular compensation reviews against market and my salary is a lot more competitive than it was 4 years ago when I joined. I've got a nice chunk of stock options too. So when we get to IPO and if it goes well, should be a very nice reward.

It is challenging, especially if you're stretching upwards and taking on challenges/responsibilities that are new to you or you're from a different culture or way of working.

This is great for growth and if you want it, you will be stretched but that's not something that is everyone's cup of tea.

In places Monzo has been lax about maintaining a high bar for performance (I see this more outside of the engineering/tech disciplines) but I have seen positive progress on restoring that bar more consistently across the company recently.

Monzo is a bank and that comes with a lot of regulation that has to be understood, interpreted and demonstrably complied with and that can take its toll at times, especially for people new to working for a bank.

Keep a high bar for performance and keep the company highly ambitious, both of those things will stop us descending into 'just being another bank with a nice app'.