Our 2023 diversity and inclusion report

We serve a broad and diverse base of over 9 million customers and 400k businesses across the UK. We have ambitious goals to change the world of banking, and to build something that makes money work for everyone, we have to represent all of them. We know that diverse teams make better products, give better services and ultimately produce better outcomes for customers. That’s why D&I is a company-wide focus, and creating an environment where everyone can belong is core to our ways of working.

We have D&I goals that we report at ExCo and Board level. They’re focused on improving representation of women, People of Colour and Black and Black Mixed representation at senior manager level. It’s important we have diverse representation at every level of leadership and decision making. We also closely monitor representation in our technical roles as these tend to be highly compensated and the least diverse in the industry.

In 2023 we defined our employee value proposition. We took a bottom-up approach and spoke to people across Monzo to understand what had motivated them to join and what was important to them about our ways of working.

Throughout our interviews inclusion came through so strongly that it became one of the pillars of our employee value proposition, which we’ve nicknamed Monzo MAGIC: Mission, Action, Growth, Inclusion, Care. Our employee value proposition is core to how we make decisions about people experience, our goals, and how we work as a company.

The theme that came from those interviews was not to suggest that everything was perfect, but instead they prized the commitment to inclusion throughout Monzo, at all levels, and our continued willingness and passion to challenge ourselves to move forward.

Throughout the year we supported learning and development and awareness initiatives that covered topics ranging from mental health, religious celebrations, neurodiversity, sexuality and more. In 2023 we expanded the use of our learning budget so that all staff could choose to invest in learning British Sign Language.

We continue to invest in our ‘COps Who Code’ Engineering Sponsorship programme where people in our customer service roles are sponsored to train as an Engineer with the offer of a Junior Engineering role available at the end of it. We also continue to work with apprentices in areas like Finance to welcome people from different backgrounds into the team. This work is focused on improving mobility both externally and internally and we have seen over 310 internal moves in the last year.

We use engagement surveys on a regular cadence to understand peoples' satisfaction with D&I at Monzo. We continue to be in the top 10% of the technology sector, with an average score of 8.8 out of 10 throughout the year and a participation rate of 83%.

One of the key themes we noticed through feedback is that we need to do more to bring attention to the work that we do each day to support diversity and inclusion at Monzo.

Throughout 2023 we tested different communication channels to see what resonated with staff, from appearances at company wide meetings to podcasts, Slack updates and newsletters. We strive to reflect the needs of our changing workforce, so we'll continue to evolve our approaches to communicating D&I initiatives in 2024 and beyond.

Our representation of staff who have a mental health condition has reduced from 29.9% to 25.3%, which brings us in line with the NHS who say 25% of adults experience a mental health condition at some point in their life.

We introduced a new benefit to give people access to counselling and coaching through an online platform, across specialisms like sexuality or neurodiversity. This is on top of private health insurance already on offer which has mental health provisions baked in.

The proportion of staff who are neurodiverse has remained the same between 2022 and 2023 at 12.5%. In 2023 we increased the education and resources for individuals and managers on how best to support neurodiverse folks. We also celebrated neurodiversity week by celebrating our internal community, giving opportunities for folks to share their experience and broaden their understanding of different kinds of neurodiversity.

The proportion of staff who have a disability at Monzo has remained the same at 7.2%. In 2023 we ran our first Empathy Labs sessions that gave people the opportunity to experience accessibility tools that are available to people. We started with a launch at our company “Connect” all hands showcasing accessibility tools that everyone now has access to. Then we took the sessions to some teams at Monzo where they were able to try goggles and gloves that simulate different impairments. This is important as accessibility is not one person or team's responsibility. The more we can all educate ourselves the better we can improve our ways of working across Monzo to make us more empathetic and understanding of our customers and each other. There are now specific learning modules Product Managers must do before they are able to design Products at Monzo to ensure accessibility is at the foundation of everything we do.

We increased our paid sick leave allowance this year from 20 days to 25 in order to give people more space when they’re not able to work. We have also adjusted our shift patterns and introduced more part time roles within our customer service team, so we’re better able to support people's wellbeing and welcome more people to Monzo who might not want a full time role.

Throughout the year we invest in bringing our people together, whether through our social budget that teams can use as they wish each month, or through company events. We’re a primarily distributed company with 74% of people working from home full time. For our summer party we have events in our London and Cardiff offices, and in 2023 we trialled bringing our party to Glasgow where we have a high density of people working from home. We also hosted online events for people to come together virtually and sent company gifts out to everyone, alongside social events our employee networks host throughout the year to foster a greater sense of community and belonging. We believe this focus is why Inclusion (8.5) and Peer Relationships (8.9) continue to be two of the highest drivers of engagement at Monzo.

We hired over 500 women (50% of our hires) in 2023, many into tech roles, which has contributed to increasing the proportion of women in our tech teams. This has improved our company gender pay gap.

While the representation of women in technical leadership roles continues to increase (by 1.5ppt to 24.0% since our last report), we still need to work on this to meet our company-wide target of 40% women in leadership positions across Monzo (currently at 37%) – and to close our gender pay gap.

More than half of our leadership positions are in tech roles, which is why our Women in Tech strategy is core to our success. Some of the areas we’re looking at to achieve this include:

From 2022 to 2023, representation of People of Colour in all roles has risen from 23.1% to 30.6% and for Black and Mixed Black staff from 6.3% to 10.6%.

Monzo's Race Inclusion Plan looks at attraction, inclusion and progression of People of Colour with a focus on the Black and Mixed Black community. This plan aims to help us achieve our company-wide goal to increase representation of Black and Mixed Black people in leadership positions to be representative of the areas where we live and work.

Since our last report we sponsored the set up of our first official employee network at Monzo. Black Monzo kicked off with a strategy day and throughout 2023 worked to create a council, a vision and a strategy which is focused on fostering community and belonging as well as progression and professional development.

We’ve built on the success of the first Mutual Mentoring programme pilot and turned it into a regular event. We’ll be building on this in 2024 with a specific focus on career mentoring within the Black and Mixed Black community.

To help with internal mobility, we piloted a career pathways programme that focused on our customer service employees to start with, providing greater support and insight into different career options and development available at Monzo.

We have continued our partnership with Coding Black Females as part of our Race Inclusion Plan and our Women in Tech strategy, to contribute to the wider tech community by supporting the career development of Black and Mixed Black women. Engineers and engineering leaders from Monzo partner with women from Coding Black Females for 12 weeks, covering a range of topics such as career planning, imposter syndrome, coding advice and everything in between. We closed the end of this year's mentoring programme with an event hosted by our CTO Matej Pfajfar and VP of Engineering Tom Leitch, who have sponsored the partnership and celebrated the impact and learning felt on both sides due to the relationship.

ℹ️ At Monzo, we collect data about trans identity separately, so we aren’t conflating it with sexual orientation.

Since 2020 we have seen the number of people who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, queer or who prefer to self describe decreasing slightly year on year. As we grow it is normal for these numbers to fluctuate as our overall population becomes more diverse. We still remain significantly above the UK census where 3.3% of people who shared their sexual orientation identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual or another sexual orientation.

The percentage of both non-binary and trans people hasn’t changed significantly from 2022 to 2023 and remains around 1.0%.

Each year we celebrate our Summer of Pride which is hosted and led by the LGBTQ+ group at Monzo. This year we took part in Cardiff pride as well as other regional pride walks to celebrate our distributed staff. We also held virtual events to bring the community and its allies together throughout the UK. During our Summer of Pride we launched new policies and guidance on how we support transgender staff. This was focused on highlighting the different kinds of support available and raising awareness and education on how best to support and include people. As part of this launch we partnered with our private health insurer for an event to talk about gender dysphoria and the resources they’re able to offer and to educate others in the process.

As part of our Summer of Pride, we took the opportunity to formally launch the LGBTQ+ network. Our unofficial, grassroots community has been thriving at Monzo since 2015, but we wanted more guidance and structures for people who wanted to start working on initiatives to move the needle on what our community cares about. We established a council who are currently setting their goals for the year ahead. So far, they've: invested time in raising awareness and highlighting resources within the community on topics related to physical and mental health, celebrated awareness days across the sexuality spectrum, and organised community socials to bring people closer together. They’ve also partnered with external communities to gain experience and network across the industry.

Over the last few years we’ve seen the number of staff who follow a religion increase steadily. Since our last report there has been a 7.1% increase in staff identifying as religious, bringing us to an overall population of 37.4%. As part of this growth we have seen the number of grassroots groups increase with people coming together to celebrate, educate and foster a sense of community around their religions. We continue to celebrate and highlight religious festivals to foster a culture of learning and inclusion. This is why we don’t enforce bank holidays on people. Instead, we let them book the days that are important to them, as we know that this improves belonging and wellbeing.

Each year we publish this report in order to keep our staff, our customers and anyone else who is interested in our progress updated. We started publishing this report in 2015 because we know that the work to be a company that is diverse, equitable and fosters an authentic sense of belonging will never end and will only become more complex as we grow. Each year we tell you about what’s new and what we have been doing differently, but over time many things have become embedded into our default ways of working. They may not be shiny and new, but we have seen them work and will keep doing these things day in and day out as part of how we run as a company.

We don’t have relationships with or source from specific schools.

We know that many of our goals and ambitions will not happen overnight and there will be fluctuations year on year. We take a long term view of progress and seeing us move closer to our goals over time gives us confidence we’re on the right track, but also hunger to continue pushing forward. We’ll keep focusing on our company level goals and on creating an environment where everyone can do their best work.