Are we entering a new age of service transparency?

I published a brief post on this subject back in February when both AWS and Monzo (along with other new banking entrants) suffered outages but were extremely transparent with end users as to what had caused it, pondering if the established players in the market would share similar details if they have issues in the future.

Last week, Monzo again suffered intermittent outages as a result of their card processor provider experiencing technical issues that it was having issues solving.  Similar to how they responded earlier in the year, Monzo were transparent and pro-active with all of their users advising them to carry a back up card, as well advising that in the background they had been piloting an in-house card processor which when launched as part of the “full bank” proposition later this year will hopefully mitigate these issues occurring.

What was really interesting was the level of understanding that Monzo’s customers demonstrated – countless tweets praising the pro-activeness of the bank, along with the public apology by their CEO regarding the recent outages. Yes, some customer weren't understanding, but the majority of communications as well as media coverage was pretty positive. If we compare this to the reaction from both the media and customers to recent outages by Barclays, Natwest and Royal Bank of Scotland, it is polls apart; I expect this is part due to the affection some of the new entrants such as Monzo are getting from both customers and industry commentators due to their “challenger” nature, however I expect a big part is due to the way the outages were handled.

Looking to the future, it will be interesting to see if the likes of Barclays, Natwest, RBS, HSBC etc adopt a more transparent and humble communication style with their customers (as Monzo currently have); certainly I expect as the level of transparency the likes of Monzo and others demonstrate, clients will start to expect this from other more established players.