https://monzo.com/blog 2025-09-01T01:30:49Z An unofficial Monzo blog feed generated by Akash Goswami (https://akashgoswami.dev) 2025-07-30T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2025-07-30:/blog/build-a-reactive-fraud-prevention-platform

Over the last year, we've re-designed our Fraud Prevention Platform at Monzo to scale with control complexity, allows us to ship fast and adds better monitoring for our controls

2025-07-11T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2025-07-11:/blog/from-dashboards-to-data-products-how-we-are-redesigning-analytics-in-monzo

This post is about a significant change in how we approach data within Operations: shifting from a service mindset to treating our data as a product. As a result our teams can self-serve more effectively, helping us navigate our platform migration.

2025-07-02T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2025-07-02:/blog/monzo-is-opening-an-engineering-hub-in-barcelona

We're opening an office and hub in Barcelona to support our core platform and help reach our ambition of making money work for everyone, globally! We're attending, sponsoring and hosting events in Barcelona throughout the year ✨

2025-05-28T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2025-05-28:/blog/designing-bulk-payments-for-how-businesses-really-work

This blog discusses how we designed and built bulk payments: letting users send multiple payments in one go. It's a story of cross-team collaboration, complex challenges, and how we stayed laser-focused on what our users actually need to get done.

2025-05-02T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2025-05-02:/blog/demystifying-the-senior-staff-engineering-interview-process

We want to explain exactly what our Senior Staff+ interview process entails to make it fair and transparent for all our applicants. This post explains what you should expect from each of our interviewing stages and how to prepare.

2025-05-01T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2025-05-01:/blog/how-we-built-a-product-to-demystify-credit-scores

This blogs explains the process of building and iterating on credit insights. We give you insight into how we use research to build products that meet customer needs, both at the start of the product design process and on an ongoing basis.

2025-04-03T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2025-04-03:/blog/processing-payments-in-monzo-stand-in

Monzo Stand-in is able to process payments in the event of a major outage of the Primary Platform. Customers can continue to use their card and send or receive bank transfers as normal

2025-03-28T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2025-03-28:/blog/we-have-updated-our-engineering-principles

At Monzo, we have a set of engineering principles which encapsulate what we value as an engineering organisation. We first wrote our engineering principles in 2018, and recently invested in updating them to better reflect where we are now

2025-03-01T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2025-03-01:/blog/demystifying-the-backend-engineering-interview-process

We want to explain exactly what our Backend Engineering interview process entails to make it fair and transparent for all our applicants. This post explains what you should expect from each of our interviewing stages and how to prepare.

2025-02-13T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2025-02-13:/blog/tolerating-full-cloud-outages-with-monzo-stand-in

We built a completely separate backup banking infrastructure called Monzo Stand-in to add another layer of defence so customers can continue to use important services provided by us

2025-02-06T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2025-02-06:/blog/making-identity-verification-more-accessible

At Monzo we're trying to be an inclusive company that pushes boundaries in an attempt to reach our mission, to “Make money work for everyone”. We are taking steps to ensure everyone can us Monzo independently.

2025-01-29T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2025-01-29:/blog/preparing-for-mobile-interviews-at-monzo

Our mobile interview process is designed to learn about your strengths. The post explains the specific skills and abilities that will make you successful in the role and what to expect in the interview process.

2025-01-16T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2025-01-16:/blog/how-each-role-in-borrowing-data-allows-us-to-think-big-and-innovate

Monzo has a huge variety of data roles in our Borrowing team that contribute to developing our credit products. In this blog we tell you what Borrowing at Monzo is, how it fits into Monzo, what the types of roles we hire for, and how to apply.

2024-12-13T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-12-13:/blog/dont-let-go-of-your-creative-spark

Our Product Designer, Victoria, talks about her learnings from the course '100 Design Projects' she attended this year, including sprinkling your own personality in every project and making sure you reflect on your own creative process.

2024-11-21T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-11-21:/blog/how-our-design-team-shapes-products-for-our-customers

This blog explains why design and research is so impactful at Monzo. We explain how we give designers and researchers an abundance of autonomy to help make decisions, and why it makes our team an outlier for those who care about making a difference.

2024-11-07T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-11-07:/blog/inclusive-hiring-in-engineering-at-monzo

Monzo cares about inclusive hiring in engineering by doing things like advertising our salaries on our job ads, sharing our process transparently, and providing different options for doing different technical interview stages

2024-10-29T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-10-29:/blog/vertically-scaling-ordered-consumption-using-kafka

We built our “unordered concurrent” subscription knowing that we could eventually extend it to support ordering in Kafka

2024-09-30T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-09-30:/blog/enabling-horizontal-autoscaling-with-co-operative-distributed-rate-limiting

Monzo runs almost 3,000 microservices to power everything. A core part of being able to run all these systems and features safely is rate limiting. In this blog post we describe how that gets us to doing what we call “distributed rate limiting.”

2024-09-18T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-09-18:/blog/we-built-a-better-system-for-scheduling-cron-jobs

We built a system to define scheduled jobs that moves away from cron and adds support for timezones, better monitoring and a more delightful developer experience

2024-09-04T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-09-04:/blog/how-we-cut-time-to-sign-up-for-monzo-us-from-17-minutes-to-4-minutes

This blog talks about how our Monzo US team revamped the signup process for customers by experimenting with signup funnel improvements, increasing the rate of completion by a massive 400%

2024-08-26T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-08-26:/blog/how-we-run-migrations-across-2800-microservices

We've got a lot of value from our microservices architecture (2,800 and counting!), but this architecture is not without its challenges. One of those challenges is how to make sweeping library changes across all those services.

2024-07-31T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-07-31:/blog/building-a-processing-system-for-international-payments

Gain an understanding of how International Payments are sent and received and how we process them at Monzo. We are making this seamless to customers whilst also having a strong focus on development experience

2024-07-30T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-07-30:/blog/the-ultimate-guide-on-using-ai-to-ace-an-interview-at-monzo

We think there are lots of benefits associated with AI, but we have a human approach to hiring. At every stage there is a person reviewing and making decisions to ensure we're able to bring the best people to Monzo.

2024-07-22T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-07-22:/blog/how-we-securely-generate-sensitive-secrets

We regularly have to create and manage secrets that grant very sensitive privileges, and so we've created a new process that makes it fast and easy for us to securely and verifiably perform all kinds of sensitive operations.

2024-07-19T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-07-19:/blog/making-mortgages-more-monzo

This blog talks about how we went 0-1 with our new Homeownership mortgage feature. It gives insight into how we transitioned from a mortgage-focused to a home-focused view, where equity (customer's progress) sits at the heart of the experience.

2024-07-03T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-07-03:/blog/delightful-payments/

This post is about how we built the Delightful Payments which directly replaced our P2P (Monzo-to-Monzo) and FPS (bank transfers) payment flows, including how we iterated on product in-parallel with design, and continuous feedback cycles.

2024-06-20T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-06-20:/blog/securing-our-software-supply-chain-better-with-reproducible-builds-for

This blog talks about how we protect our workloads against supply chain attacks, specifically by achieving bit-by-bit reproducible builds, and how we have adopted Nix an alternative to Docker for build environments.

2024-05-29T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-05-29:/blog/how-we-use-incremental-modelling-to-handle-billions-of-events-every-day

This post is an overview of how we leverage incremental modelling, a data transformation technique which helps us scale sustainably as we blast off to 10 million customers 🚀

2024-04-26T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-04-26:/blog/how-we-measured-change-aversion-with-our-new-home-screen

When we launched our new Monzo home screen, Katherine spent the past year focused on designing, launching and analysing experiments to understand how customers reacted to their new app. This blog explains how she measured change aversion.

2024-03-15T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-03-15:/blog/user-research-insight-to-impact-the-art-of-scaling-impact-and-crafting-goal

Drawing upon the wisdom and practices of our user research team at Monzo, this blog post captures ways to scale user research impact, craft effective goals, and define clear metrics.

2024-03-08T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-03-08:/blog/starting-from-scratch-as-a-new-engineer-at-monzo

I'm Grace, and I joined Monzo in October '23 as a Backend Engineer in Fincrime Business Banking. I'm here to convince you to apply for that role you really want, and about how exciting, challenging and rewarding changing roles has been for me.

2024-03-01T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-03-01:/blog/moving-monzo-com

In 2022, we embarked on a long journey to move our main website. The whole process took us from June of 2022 to November of 2023, with plenty of fun curveballs along the way. Let's dig into what it takes to migrate monzo.com.

2024-02-22T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-02-22:/blog/how-we-use-design-to-create-business-impact-at-monzo

This post delves into how Monzo is building on our product-led growth by adopting new growth design ways of working and how uniquely positioned design is as a business tool for growth. Buckle-up!

2024-02-19T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-02-19:/blog/what-are-monzos-technical-expectations-for-engineering-leaders

This post will explore how EMs at Monzo continue to leverage their software engineering backgrounds in practice, and how Monzo assesses those skills in our hiring process.

2024-02-15T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-02-15:/blog/how-to-create-a-customer-segmentation-choosing-the-right-segmentation

Customer segmentation is the art of dividing customers into useful groups, but there are a lot of pitfalls to avoid along the way. Here is Monzo's guide to help you decide your segmentation approach, collect the right data, and more.

2024-01-25T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-01-25:/blog/how-we-built-a-queue-on-top-of-kafka

This blog covers core parts of the journey Constantijn embarked on when he raised his first "small change" pull request, and how over time we have built a rich client library and set of abstractions that sit on top of Kafka

2024-01-10T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2024-01-10:/blog/how-we-unified-our-customers-activity-on-the-new-home-screen

In this blog post, we explore how we built our home screen, a single stream of activity that lets you glance over the latest updates across all your bank accounts! Less searching around, less app-hopping, less confusion. 

2023-12-22T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2023-12-22:/blog/building-year-in-monzo-as-told-by-engineering

We've shared the behind the scenes insights into how we wrote 5 million Years in Monzo, and the magic behind the data. Now we're going to dig into how we turned this data into the Year in Monzo experience you know and love.

2023-12-15T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2023-12-15:/blog/2023/12/14/securing-admin-access-to-monzos-platform/

Monzo runs on a shared platform of infrastructure that hosts our microservices. In this post, we'll discuss how we broker access to our infrastructure credentials with a system that is resistant to attacks even from the team that maintains it.

2023-11-24T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2023-11-24:/blog/2023/11/24/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-technical-programme-manager-at-monzo

The Technical Programme Manager (TPM for short) role is hugely varied. I want to take you on a journey through a typical day in my life as a Technical Programme Manager here at Monzo.

2023-10-12T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2023-10-12:/blog/2023/10/12/protecting-our-platform-from-spikes-in-usage-by-reducing-load-from-the-monzo

This blog explores how we've made our platform more resilient to spikes in app opens. We can now reduce load on our platform before we get overwhelmed so you can still access and use critical parts of the app, and your card continues to work.

2023-09-12T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2023-09-12:/blog/2023/09/12/the-skadnetwork-puzzle-using-data-to-solve-for-effective-performance/

This blog talks through how Monzo uses Data Science and Analytics Engineering to measure the value of paid marketing as Apple's SKAdNetwork changes the mobile advertising landscape, which helps to inform our wider strategies of sustainable growth

2023-08-31T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2023-08-31:/blog/2023/08/23/tech-leading-as-a-mobile-engineer-at-monzo

Mark has written about his experience and growth as a tech lead at Monzo over the last 18 months - from creeping doubts to using his mobile engineer's perspective to shape the role to his strengths

2023-08-10T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2023-08-10:/blog/2023/08/10/my-path-from-intern-to-staff-engineer-at-monzo

This blog discusses our Staff Engineer, Jacob, and his experience starting at Monzo as an intern in Engineering, and how he has developed into a Staff Engineer role.

2023-08-03T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2023-08-03:/blog/2023/08/03/how-we-launch-new-products-at-monzo

From staff testing to Monzo Labs, learn about the different ways Monzo launches new products and features - and how we don't always get it right!

2023-07-18T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2023-07-18:/blog/2023/07/18/five-lessons-from-my-first-year-at-monzo

Tarah Srethwatanakul is a Lead Researcher at Monzo. In this blog post, she shares lessons from her first year at the company.

2023-07-12T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2023-07-12:/blog/2023/07/10/how-we-do-product-management-in-the-financial-difficulties-space

In Financial Health, we're responsible for making sure we build the right tools and experiences to help our customers through thick and thin if they experience financial difficulties, while also helping Monzo grow its Borrowing products.

2023-06-01T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2023-06-01:/blog/2023/06/01/finding-your-fit-in-a-new-product-team/

This is my experience of how I searched for and found my fit as a Product Designer in my first few months at Monzo, but I believe this applies to any role joining a new product team.

2023-05-18T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2023-05-18:/blog/2023/05/18/sensitivity-analysis

This blog explains sensitivity analysis, which is a useful data science technique for assessing the impact of different variables on an outcome metric.

2023-05-10T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2023-05-10:/blog/2023/05/04/how-we-manage-technology-risk-at-monzo

In this post, three Monzonauts explain how they work together with each other and other disciplines to manage risk in a fast-moving tech-focused banking environment. 

2023-04-28T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2023-04-28:/blog/2023/04/28/speeding-up-our-balance-read-time-the-planning-phase

The ledger is where we keep track of all customer money movements coming in and out of customers' accounts. We started a project to speed up the ledger balance read time. In this post we'll cover the planning and experiments we ran.

2023-03-28T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2023-03-28:/blog/2023/03/28/what-we-learned-from-43-experiments-in-12-months

This blog shares some of the learnings we've had from our experiments in customer help and support over the last year

2023-03-20T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2023-03-20:/blog/2023/03/20/what-do-app-screens-and-pedestrian-crossings-have-in-common

This blog talks about why app screens are like pedestrian crossings, or more specifically, how some subtle tweaks to a user-interface in Monzo's sign-up process has had a surprisingly large impact!

2023-03-02T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2023-03-02:/blog/2022/03/02/designing-a-regional-experiment-to-measure-incrementality

This blog post covers the approach for how we designed a regional experiment to measure the incremental impact of our referral scheme on new customer growth.

2023-02-22T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2023-02-22:/blog/2023/02/22/becoming-direct-participants-of-bacs

In September 2022, Monzo became a Direct Participant of the Bacs scheme. In this post, Tech Lead Ryan explains how we built a new connection to the the Bacs scheme over the SWIFT banking network and managed the risks involved.

2023-01-27T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2023-01-27:/blog/2023/01/26/preparing-for-spikes-in-traffic-as-millions-get-paid-early

This blog explains the problems that occur when hundreds of thousands of customers all request to be paid millions of pounds at almost exactly the same time, and what we do to keep things running smoothly while that happens.

2022-12-19T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-12-19:/blog/2022/12/19/machine-learning-at-monzo-in-2022

An end-of-year review of how machine learning continues to evolve and grow at Monzo

2022-12-15T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-12-15:/blog/2022/12/15/building-an-extension-framework-for-dbt

dbt is a fundamental piece of Monzo's data platform. We made the big decision to build a whole new extension framework that would give us more flexibility.

2022-12-13T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-12-13:/blog/2022/12/13/monzo-magic-hackathon

This August, as we were wrapping up the summer, Monzonauts across the business set out to learn from each other, have fun and build things centred around one theme: Monzo Magic. This activity is commonly referred to in the industry as a hackathon.

2022-11-25T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-11-25:/blog/2022/11/25/reducing-nat-gateway-cost-with-private-networking-between-aws-and-gcp

Sharing knowledge on how we implementing private networking between AWS and GCP

2022-11-18T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-11-18:/blog/2022/11/16/how-insights-shaped-building-a-0-1-product-monzo-flex

We wanted to share more about why we launched a new 0-1 product to help people pay for purchases later and how a mixed-method research discovery led to the product that over hundreds of thousands of customers use and love today!

2022-11-10T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-11-10:/blog/2022/11/10/design-system-approach-to-research-guidelines

If you're starting out in a new role in research ops, design ops or any other kind of team operations, this blog will take you through the ins and outs of creating a flexible how-to guide database for scale.

2022-11-07T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-11-07:/blog/2022/11/02/argo-rollouts-at-scale

We introduced automated rollbacks to our platform using Argo Rollouts and made it the default deployment strategy for all our services. This helps us roll out changes safely and catch a wide class of problems related to deploying new code

2022-09-28T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-09-28:/blog/2022/09/29/migrating-our-monorepo-seamlessly-from-dep-to-go-modules

Since 2018, we've used Dep to manage our monorepo dependencies, but when it was deprecated switching to Go Modules was a high risk change. This post explains how we reduced that risk by iteratively updating our dependencies for a seamless migration.

2022-08-04T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-08-04:/blog/2022/08/05/scaling-our-security-detection-pipeline-with-sigma

Detective controls help us monitor our systems for unwanted behaviour, but since writing our first detection rules, our company and team has grown. This post explains how we scaled those detection rules using Sigma and have open sourced our tooling.

2022-07-25T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-07-25:/blog/2022/07/26/switching-from-customer-service-representative-to-backend-engineer

Kyle joined Monzo as a COp, a customer service representative, but three years on he now works in a product team as one of our backend engineers! Kyle and his mentor Duncan share the story of how Kyle made his career switch

2022-06-23T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-06-23:/blog/2022/06/24/redefining-our-microservice-development-process

We've been working on some new techniques to help make the development of services easier as we continue to grow and the entire platform can't be run locally.

2022-06-22T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-06-22:/blog/2022/06/23/our-mobile-release-process-an-illustrated-story

We go into our mobile release process and how we're able to sustain a steady stream of releases as the changes that go into each version increase over time

2022-05-25T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-05-25:/blog/2022/05/26/humans-who-can-rpc-securing-staff-access-to-microservices

With over 2000 microservices and lots of Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) that are constantly changing, we needed a new way to manage staff access. The Security Platform team explain how we now define RPC permissions directly in proto files.

2022-05-17T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-05-17:/blog/2022/05/18/joining-monzo-as-a-data-scientist

Izak joined Monzo as a data scientist in February. In this post, he shares his journey to Monzo and his early experience in the data discipline, with our data stack, and in the team looking after our Customer Operations.

2022-05-15T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-05-15:/blog/2022/05/16/how-we-deploy-to-production-over-100-times-a-day

Our success relies on us rapidly shipping new features. To achieve this rapid release cadence, we've optimised our engineering culture, tooling, and architecture to go from idea to production as frictionless as possible, without sacrificing safety.

2022-05-05T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-05-05:/blog/2022/05/06/becoming-an-engineering-manager-1-year-in

Last year, I made the switch into engineering management full time. It's been an interesting journey with lots of lessons learned.

2022-04-20T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-04-20:/blog/2022/04/20/how-our-android-engineers-automated-the-removal-of-kotlin-synthetics

Our Mobile Platform team recently faced the challenge of having to remove all synthetic view properties. This post explains how we built a tool to automate the task and the trade-offs we had to consider along the way.

2022-04-11T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-04-11:/blog/2022/04/12/how-anyone-at-monzo-can-test

Everyone at Monzo gets involved in testing new features and versions of the app before we release them. In this post Sarah, part of our Quality Assurance team, explains the different types of tests we use and how we run them.

2022-04-03T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-04-03:/blog/2022/04/04/my-first-3-months-at-monzo-as-an-engineering-manager

Jarryd joined Monzo as an engineering manager a few months ago. In this post he shares his journey to Monzo and how he found his feet in his new role.

2022-03-30T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-03-30:/blog/2022/03/31/how-we-secure-monzos-banking-platform

Our Security Infrastructure team introduces the principles we follow to build security in Monzo's fast-moving engineering environment and how they work with other engineering teams to keep our customers and platform safe.

2022-03-21T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-03-21:/blog/2022/03/21/data-hiring-at-monzo

We hire lots of different people in Data who join us to work in a lot of different teams. Our interviews are designed to do two things: teach you about Monzo and capture information that tells us the role is right for you.

2022-02-24T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-02-24:/blog/2022-02-24/scaling-our-on-call-process

As Monzo has grown, we've continued to change our on-call process so we can keep our systems running smoothly without sacrificing the wellbeing of our engineers. Luke Briscoe explains what we've changed and how.

2022-02-18T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-02-18:/blog/2022/02/18/how-we-calculate-balances

In June 2021 we started designing and implementing a new way to calculate balances that is more reliable and consistent. This post explains why the old approach needed improving and the changes we made.

2022-02-15T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-02-15:/blog/2022/02/15/securely-delegating-trust-with-digital-signatures-and-secret-storage-systems

This post explains how our public key infrastructure uses a combination of different secret storage systems to implement a balance between security assurances and usability.

2022-02-08T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-02-08:/blog/2022/02/08/processing-payments-safely-at-scale

We ship changes many times a day while making sure that payments are processed as expected. This blog post explores how we do this and focuses on two ideas that could be useful outside of the world of payment processing.

2022-02-04T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-02-04:/blog/2022/02/04/how-we-validated-our-handling-time-data

We make lots of decisions based on data from customer support. We need to make sure we can trust this data. In this post, Niamh explains how her team validated the data.

2022-01-28T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-01-28:/blog/2022/01/28/keep-your-phone-and-monzo-app-up-to-date

Your Monzo account is more secure and you have access to all our latest features when your app and phone are up to date.

2022-01-17T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2022-01-17:/blog/2022/02/17/my-first-6-months-at-monzo-as-a-backend-engineer

Bee Skerritt joined the Infrastructure squad as a backend engineer. In this post, he explains his journey to Monzo and his experience so far.

2021-11-18T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2021-11-18:/blog/2021/11/18/protecting-our-most-sensitive-secrets

As a bank, we have private keys and other 'secrets' we need to protect, to keep our customers and ourselves safe. Our security controls work together to stop even the most determined and capable attackers.

2021-10-13T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2021-10-13:/blog/2021/10/14/an-introduction-to-monzos-data-stack

An overview of the data stack we use at Monzo, some of the challenges we face, and what we want to change.

2021-09-30T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2021-09-30:/blog/2021/09/30/documenting-pull-requests-is-as-important-as-writing-good-code

How our engineering teams document pull requests to help other teams and their future colleagues review changes.

2021-09-15T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2021-09-15:/blog/2021/09/15/how-we-measure-software-excellence

We're experimenting with ways to measure, track, and improve the quality of our software.

2021-04-22T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2021-04-22:/blog/lessons-from-implementing-progression-frameworks-at-scale

We introduced the first progression framework for engineers about three years ago. But as the engineering organisation has changed, we found it was hurting, not helping career conversations at Monzo. This is what we did to fix it.

2021-03-05T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2021-03-05:/blog/engineering-management-at-monzo-technical-leadership-people-support

We've evolved our approach from supporting and developing individual engineers, to providing both excellent people support and technical leadership for teams and business areas.

2020-10-19T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2020-10-19:/blog/2020/10/19/autoscaling-monzo

How we've automated the process of scaling up our platform for our ever-growing userbase.

2020-05-13T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2020-05-13:/blog/how-we-moved-our-faster-payments-connection-in-house

Our in-house Faster Payments gateway has been running since November 2019. This is a comprehensive insight into how we built it.

2020-05-10T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2020-05-10:/blog/how-weve-evolved-on-call-at-monzo

We've built a humane on-call rotation, that engineers actually want to join!

2020-04-05T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2020-04-05:/blog/controlling-outbound-traffic-from-kubernetes

We recently finished a major networking project which let us control internal traffic in our platform. And we've been thinking about how we can add similar security to network traffic leaving our platform.

2019-12-17T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2019-12-17:/blog/migrating-vaults-storage-with-no-downtime

We use Vault for secret management and credential issuance, and we've always configured it with the Cassandra storage backend. To help us scale, we moved to the S3 backend. But it was crucial we kept Vault available.

2019-12-17T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2019-12-17:/blog/we-secured-thousands-of-cassandra-clients-to-keep-monzos-data-safe

Our security team at Monzo are working towards a 'zero trust' cluster, where an attacker inside our cluster would have no power.

2019-12-16T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2019-12-16:/blog/bringing-our-faster-payments-connection-in-house

It's been running smoothly, handling every single Faster Payment that you've been sending in and out of Monzo!

2019-12-12T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2019-12-12:/blog/coordinators-on-android-building-flows-quickly-with-reusable-screens

When we first built Monzo on Android, we couldn't 'reuse' screens. We'd build them from scratch every time! To help us work faster, we've used a new architectural pattern called 'the Coordinator Pattern' in our codebase.

2019-11-06T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2019-11-06:/blog/we-built-network-isolation-for-1-500-services

We've been working on isolating the 1,500 services that power Monzo. The sheer size and complexity of our platform made this difficult. But by protecting us against compromised services, it makes Monzo more secure.

2019-10-11T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2019-10-11:/blog/2019/10/11/how-our-security-team-handle-secrets

We recently designed a new system to manage secret information safely - from the keys that we use to sign your Mastercard transactions, to credentials for external services.

2019-07-31T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2019-07-31:/blog/2019/07/31/how-we-experiment-at-monzo

Making big decisions is hard. So at Monzo, we test our ideas out whenever we can. Here's how that works!

2019-07-08T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2019-07-08:/blog/2019/07/08/how-we-respond-to-incidents

A good response process can mean the difference between something being resolved in minutes and an issue developing into something worse!

2019-07-03T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2019-07-03:/blog/2019/07/03/the-role-of-technology-in-social-inclusion

The technology we use to create Monzo can play a key part in our mission to make money work for everyone.

2019-05-30T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2019-05-30:/blog/2019/05/30/faster-payments-issue

Some bank transfers aren't working. We're working on sorting it out asap.

2019-05-28T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2019-05-28:/blog/2019/05/28/fixing-notifications-on-android

We encountered an interesting bug in our Android app notifications. Here's how we fixed it.

2019-04-03T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2019-04-03:/blog/2019/04/03/deploying-envoy-proxy

We moved our remote procedure call (RPC) service mesh from Linkerd to Envoy to make Monzo faster.

2019-03-19T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2019-03-19:/blog/2019/03/19/improving-our-staff-VPN

OpenVPN is great, but there were some things we wanted to change.

2019-02-11T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2019-02-11:/blog/2019/02/11/building-monzo-chat-on-android/

We've built bespoke software from scratch, that helps us manage chats in the app. Here's how we implemented it on Android.

2019-01-16T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2019-01-16:/blog/2019/01/16/crowdfunding-technology-systems

We prepared our systems for crowdfunding by shedding load, and built tools to help us monitor on the day.

2019-01-15T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2019-01-15:/blog/2019/01/15/crowdfunding-technology-testing

More than 9,000 people opened their apps to invest in the first five minutes of crowdfunding. To make sure we were ready, we ran tests to simulate the extra load and upgraded our platform to cope with it.

2019-01-14T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2019-01-14:/blog/2019/01/14/crowdfunding-technology-backend-architecture

We architected and built a scalable backend to support 36,000 investments.

2018-12-04T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2018-12-04:/blog/2018/11/29/refactoring-old-code

We held an internal hackathon to improve some of the oldest code in the bank! Here's why that's good for our engineers and our customers.

2018-09-20T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2018-09-20:/blog/2018/09/20/on-call

A team of engineers are available 24/7/365 to respond when things go wrong. For other companies thinking about how to approach incidents, here's how we do on-call at Monzo.

2018-07-27T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2018-07-27:/blog/2018/07/27/how-we-monitor-monzo

We use tools to monitor all our systems to make sure everything's working as it should. Platform team lead Chris shares a technical insight into the way we monitor Monzo.

2018-04-05T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2018-04-05:/blog/2018/04/05/how-monzo-to-monzo-payments-work

Backend Engineer James Routley explains the technical work we do to help you send payments to your contacts on Monzo.

2018-03-02T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2018-03-02:/blog/2018/03/02/app-development

Product Manager Jami explains how we turn a sneak peek on the forum into something you can hold in your hands.

2017-11-29T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2017-11-29:/blog/2017/11/29/very-robust-etcd

We know Monzo's platform must be extremely reliable, and etcd is one of our most critical components. We've gone to great lengths to make sure it can survive a range of failures.

2017-07-07T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2017-07-07:/blog/2017/07/07/working-with-backend-services-on-ios

How we refactored our iOS app to work better with backend services.

2017-05-05T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2017-05-05:/blog/2017/05/05/why-payments-are-declined

We break down the common causes of declined card payments.

2017-05-03T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2017-05-03:/blog/2017/05/03/practical-machine-learning-for-startups

Monzo's Head of Data and Analytics walks through our recent advances in using machine learning to make predictions based on existing data.

2017-02-17T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2017-02-17:/blog/2017/02/17/four-useful-services-your-bank-should-not-be-charging-for

Click to read more

2017-02-13T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2017-02-13:/blog/2017/02/13/5-features-your-mobile-bank-account-should-have-by-now

Click to read more

2017-02-03T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2017-02-03:/blog/2017/02/03/fighting-fraud-with-machine-learning

How we have prevented £400,000 of fraud over the last 6 months

2017-01-27T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2017-01-27:/blog/2017/01/27/designing-product-mental-health-mind

How we're designing Monzo to be a powerful and unique financial service for our most vulnerable customers.

2016-11-29T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2016-11-29:/blog/2016/11/30/laying-the-foundation-for-a-data-team

At Monzo, we want to build the best bank account in the world. Today, more than ever before, data is central to creating wonderful customer experiences and efficient internal operations.

2016-09-19T00:00:00Z tag:monzo.com,2016-09-19:/blog/2016/09/19/building-a-modern-bank-backend

This first post in a series about our platform explains how we're building systems to meet these demands using modern, open-source technology...