[5] Originally operating through a mobile app and a prepaid debit card, in April 2017 its UK banking licence restrictions were lifted, enabling it to offer a full current account.

[2] Monzo Bank was founded as Mondo in 2015 by Tom Blomfield,[7][8][9][10] Jonas Huckestein, Jason Bates, Paul Rippon and Gary Dolman.

In February 2016, Monzo set the record for "quickest crowd-funding campaign in history" when it raised £1 million in 96 seconds via the Crowdcube investment platform.

[20] The full licence allowed Monzo to provide its customers with current accounts, who up until that point were only able to be offered pre-paid debit cards.

In August 2019, the company announced that it had inadvertently logged 480,000 customer personal identification numbers, making them accessible to Monzo's internal team of engineers.

[40] In February 2016, Monzo set the record for "quickest crowd-funding campaign in history" when it raised £1 million in 96 seconds via the Crowdcube investment platform.

[12][13][14] In October 2016, Monzo announced an 'interim' funding round valuing the company at £50M and raised £4.8M in the process, led by Passion Capital.

[41] This round was followed by a second £2.5 million Crowdcube crowd-funding campaign with the total pledged quickly hitting the target amount.

[62] Monzo initially issued (with partner company Wirecard[63]) a variety of alpha, beta and investor cards to its customers who wanted to be early adopters.

From early on, Monzo has issued cards in a neon "hot coral" colour - initially intended as a temporary measure during prototyping[66] - but later, a deliberate decision arising from the success of the "eye-catching" design.

[67] In December 2017, Monzo issued new Debit Mastercard cards to all its existing and new customers as the bank began rolling out current accounts.

The API allows developers to view transactions and accounts, receive notifications for events via webhooks and create their own items to appear in the app.

[78] In a response to this investigation, the company said that account closures take place if the bank "suspect[s] there's financial crime".

[79] A group of three individuals have created a website (OTP.Agency) that charged criminals a monthly payment, aiding in socially engineering bank account holders into sharing their passcodes or other personal data.

The basic package allowed multi-factor authentication to be bypassed on a platform such as Monzo, facilitating fraudulent online transactions.

The NCA's cyber investigation started in June 2020, leading to the shut down of the fraudulent website in March 2021 following the arrest of the three individuals.

[82][83] In July 2023, Gina Miller's True and Fair Party was informed that their bank account with Monzo would be closed.

[84] Monzo said that they did not accept political parties as customers, and that True and Fair's account was not originally categorised as such in its application.