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NEWS Starling Bank pranksters mock Monzo
publicity stunt? Starling Bank’s decision to crash rival UK challenger bank Mondo’s name change party in August has divided opinion, with some giving it the thumbs up and others failing to see the funny side. Mondo announced its new name (Monzo) during a gathering at its London HQ which was live streamed on YouTube. It was forced down this route following a legal challenge by an undisclosed company, leading it to invite feedback from the general public (10,000 people gave 12,560 suggestions).
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At this point, it should be pointed out that Starling is the brainchild of Anne Boden, a former Chief Operating Officer of Allied Irish Bank (AIB). Last year, she was left looking for a new management team, following the departure of CTO Tom Blomfield (who went on to launch Mondo, taking a number of key members with him). So it was no great surprise when Starling popped up and tweeted ‘Congrats on #NewMondo and good luck > xx from us @Starling’ whilst providing a link to its sign-up page.
It also guessed at what the new name might be, bought some of those domains, posted congratulations message there and then redirected traffic to a designated landing page for Starling Bank sign-ups. In a post on the new entrant’s blog, Malka Finkelstein, Creative and Content Manager, writes: “Word came in some time last week about Mondo’s new name: Monzo, Milo, Motion, Moji? What could it be? We searched for clues which would validate our suspicions and found that Monzo was being trademarked, and that although the main Monzo domains were taken, some of them were still available. We knew we had to respond somehow. So we did the reasonable thing and bought them ourselves. So here we are with a bunch of domains and plenty of good will; we created a congratulation message in the form of an animated gif which makes a pun of Starling’s own naming history, thus starting a new chapter in the story.”
She adds: “Once Tom announced Mondo’s new name, we launched “our” sites and redirected the users to our landing page. We didn’t even know what to expect. Due to a delay in Monzo’s own site launch, people picked up on
musing marketing prank or desperate
our greeting at
getmonzo.co.uk and conversation on Twitter went wild. Some was negative, but most of it saw the true intent and the good spirit behind it. We live in a disruptive age, using disruptive platforms to tear down the rules of an old game. Therefore, it only makes sense that we’ll attempt to prank eachother to get attention over our competitor’s trends. This is how social media works. At the end of the day, we got thousands mentions on Twitter, the vast majority applauds the cheeky prank, while the rest clearly don’t get the joke. We wish Monzo the best of luck and hopefully this will only contribute to the competition. Just make sure you have everything covered for next time.”
Ouch. Will Mondo (sorry, Monzo) hit back or take the high road? Our money’s on the latter option. It does, after all, have its hands full at present, having recently received news from the Bank of England that it had been granted authorisation to conduct banking activities. At the moment, that authorisation comes with restrictions – the main one being that it can only hold a maximum of £50,000 of deposits in total. The intention of this is to allow new banks to test systems with live payment networks before fully launching to the public. The venture has up to 12 months to get the restrictions lifted and is aiming to launch a full current account in Q1 or Q2 of 2017.
Scott Thompson
www.ibsintelligence.com © IBS Intelligence 2016
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