IN CONVERSATION WITH MONZO COO SUJATA BHATIA
Sujata Bhatia, Monzo COO
Previously one of Amex’s top executives, Sujata started her career as an accountant and then healthcare consultant with Ernst & Young. After completing her Wharton MBA, she worked at Goldman Sachs and then Bain & Co as a strategy consultant for a few years before joining American Express and now Monzo.
Sujata talks to us about staying nimble as a scale up and her journey from leading an incumbent to one of the new power players in consumer finance. Founded in 2015, Monzo is one of the UK’s most successful digital neobanks. The company became a regulated bank and a unicorn in 2018 and has raised £1b in total.
Where will you drive new growth, which market is next and how will you go about it?
All of our UK businesses are still at the beginning of the journey and have long runways - so we see a lot of great growth opportunities in the UK both from new customers and deepening our relationships with our existing customers by meeting more of their financial needs. The US will be our next market. We have a small product lead team there, exploring product market fit. The US is a complicated and large market. The scale is there, the economics are there, but you can throw a lot of money into marketing without having the right product to begin with. In the UK we had the fortune of achieving great product market fit early on, which created viral growth that has been critical for our products to be really successful. And that’s our playbook!
How do you navigate different markets given different consumer behaviours, technology offerings and adoption?
I remember being in Amex where I ran payments globally. I would go from the UK and continental Europe, which is so much more advanced, and then Asia, which was its own kettle of fish then to the US. We'd be talking about whether we need to issue our cards with chips on them and a three-year roadmap to do that. It was a totally different mindset.
In the US, people pay differently, they borrow differently, they save and invest differently. So every aspect of your product has to be tailored for that. And there are some idiosyncrasies - for example, it's still a market with a large number of checks in circulation. Banking is a universal need, but success in the US, given the scale of the market, starts by focusing on the needs of a key segment.
Given Monzo’s relative maturity, how do you maintain an entrepreneurial culture in a scale up?
We have an interesting conundrum, right? Because we're both a regulated bank and a tech company. We're really a tech company that is a regulated bank. The traditional goal setting in a big financial service firm is not fit for purpose. And the opposite is true too, working on six month sprints.
We have five company priorities and then a six month goal process. Then we have different parts of the business laddering up to that and doing their bottoms up goal setting. If that's our north star, roughly, what do we think our goals around that should be? And what do we think the activities are that will support that? And then there's an iterative process in between, i.e., if we do all of that and there's a gap, or we do all of that and there's an opportunity. Then we bottom that out across the teams.
We have personal banking, business banking, and borrowing. They're all led by GM's that have their own goals and visions for their areas. So we have a good sense of the shape of the plan and what that needs to look like to meet our ambitions, and the GMs are empowered to achieve that.
What has been the most surprising thing about working in a challenger culture versus the establishment that you didn't expect?
I think I'm surprised that a lot of my skills have transferred and that was actually a real fear of mine. Am I even going to be relevant and helpful here? Knowing and seeing that I could make a difference was encouraging.
My biggest surprise and learning has been working in an engineering led culture. I came from a company where technology was a business unit and people engaged with technology to be able to do what they needed to do. Being in a company where technology is the heart of your business and actually is the business, it means that your ways of working are totally different.
How the squads work together, everything is so much more integrated, engineering-led decisioning and engineered solutions were a new experience for me and super cool. It's exactly what I wanted to learn, but not like my experience in the years before that.
As in agile technology development processes versus waterfall?
It's more that your engineers are the ones who are framing and understanding the business problems and coming up with solutions. They are the business and that's a totally different culture to being managed off in the corner and asked to provide what some business person needs to deliver their strategy. They are the co-creators of the strategy and the co-creators of the solutions because they deeply understand the problems. That's pretty cool.