Monzo & Wrapped

It’s Wrapped season! I’ve always found this an interesting time of the year, where Spotify gives me an interactive, personalised summary of the year past. My top song of the year was Bigmouth Strikes Again, and my top artist of the year was System of a Down. Please make it make sense?

This year, the trend has been jumped on by various organisations, some unexpected. I’ve had one from Strava, detailing how my 4 (!!) days of recorded activity are a groundbreaking triumph (it was cool to do the Yorkshire Three Peaks this year). The visuals of Strava’s are gorgeous though, clean, simple, well crafted.

Another one is Monzo. This one has been quite a lot more controversial, given the cost of living crisis the UK has faced this year - food prices, energy prices, rampant inflation in every sector. Savings have gone down as consumers have needed to dip into their hard earned cash reserves to keep afloat. (Published June 2023)

When it comes down to the implementation of Monzo’s Wrapped, it’s quite an interesting technical feat - their engineering blog post covers all aspects from generating the data ahead of time, to the storage and retrieval of that pre-generated data, to the animations that display (or don’t if you use a screen reader or reduced mobility mode!).

I don’t use Monzo as my primary bank account, so a lot of my spend this year is invisible to the gremlins in their data pipeline that are trying to gather Insights™ into my behaviour. I’m sure my top merchant would still be Greggs though…. 😅

When it comes down to it though, what value does a move like this provide to Monzo? For consumers, it’s an interesting insight into your own spending (whether you like it or not), and it’s a conversation starter – but the effort that goes into producing something like this, for less than 2 minutes worth of screen time, makes me question the motivators.