Monzo

Is Monzo safe?

Yes, up to the FSCSDeposit insuranceA government-backed scheme that repays bank customers up to a set limit if their bank fails, such as the FDIC in the US or the FSCS in the UK.More in the glossary limit. Monzo is a fully authorised UK bank, Monzo Bank Ltd, since April 2017, not an e-moneyE-moneyMoney held as a stored balance with a payment firm rather than as a bank deposit. It is safeguarded, not covered by deposit insurance.More in the glossary firm, so eligible money in its current accounts, pots and savings is protected to £120,000 per person. Its capital and liquidity ratios are far higher than at the big high-street banks, mostly because it lends out little of what it takes in. The score of 70/100 is pulled down by a £21.1 million FCA fine for financial crime failings, the lack of credit ratings and a track record that has not been tested by a crisis.

How FSCS protection works at Monzo

All of Monzo's UK personal and business accounts sit in one legal entity, so there is one simple limit:

Account	FSCSDeposit insuranceA government-backed scheme that repays bank customers up to a set limit if their bank fails, such as the FDIC in the US or the FSCS in the UK.More in the glossary limit
Personal accounts, pots and savings	£120,000 per person, added together
Joint account	£120,000 per holder (£240,000 for two)
Business account	£120,000 per business
Temporary high balances (house sale, inheritance)	Up to £1.4 million for six months

Unlike Lloyds, Monzo does not have sister brands, so you do not need to check which licence an account uses. Monzo's investments and pensions are not deposits; if Monzo failed, they would be handled under the separate rules for investment firms.

Monzo now also has a bank in Ireland, licensed by the Central Bank of Ireland in December 2025. Irish customers are covered by Ireland's deposit guarantee scheme up to €100,000, not by the FSCS.

Capital and liquidity

Measure (31 March 2026)	Monzo Bank Ltd
CET1 ratioCET1 ratioA bank's highest-quality capital (mainly shares and retained profits) as a share of its risk-weighted assets. Higher means more room to absorb losses.More in the glossary	27.3%
Overall capital requirement	19.8%
UK leverage ratioLeverage ratioA bank's Tier 1 capital divided by its total exposures, without adjusting for risk. It is a simple backstop to risk-based capital rules.More in the glossary	8.3%
Liquidity coverage ratioLiquidity coverage ratioA bank's cash and easy-to-sell assets compared with the money that could flow out in a 30-day crisis. It must be at least 100%.More in the glossary	1,114%
Net stable funding ratioNet stable funding ratioA bank's stable funding, such as capital and retail deposits, compared with the stable funding its assets need over one year. It must be at least 100%.More in the glossary	737%

Monzo's capital ratio looks very high, but so is its requirement. Regulators set a larger Pillar 2A add-on for a fast-growing bank with a short history: 4.1% of risk-weighted assets in CET1, against about 1.4% at Lloyds. With buffers, Monzo must hold about 13.1% in CET1, slightly more than Lloyds' 12%, so its 27.3% still leaves more than twice the required level. The CET1 ratio fell from 41.0% a year earlier, mainly because operational risk in its risk-weighted assets was updated for two years of growth at once, not because of losses. It made a statutory profit before tax of £87.3 million in the year to March 2026 and £172.6 million on its adjusted measure.

Liquidity is the strongest part of the picture. Customers held £25.7 billion with Monzo, up 55% in a year, but loans to customers were only £2.3 billion. Cash at the Bank of England equalled 60% of customer deposits, and another £9.5 billion sat in treasury investments. The risk for any app-based bank is speed: customers can move money out in seconds, as the 2023 run on Silicon Valley Bank showed. Monzo's liquid assets could cover far more outflows than the rules require.

The FCA fine

In July 2025 the FCA fined Monzo £21,091,300. It found that between October 2018 and August 2020 Monzo's onboarding checks, customer risk assessments and transaction monitoring had not kept up as the customer base grew almost tenfold, to more than 5.8 million. Some customers were accepted with obviously implausible details, such as famous London landmarks as their home address.

The FCA then imposed a requirement stopping Monzo from opening accounts for high-risk customers, and Monzo repeatedly broke it between August 2020 and June 2022, signing up more than 34,000 such customers. Monzo says it has completed the remediation programme required by an independent review. The fine did not put customer deposits at risk, but breaking a regulator's restriction is the main reason conduct scores 52, below Revolut at 60.

App reliability and fraud

Monzo runs its own core banking system in the cloud and keeps a separate standby system, which it calls Stand-In, to take over essential services if the main platform fails. It reported 99.998% availability for Faster Payments processing in its last financial year and said Stand-In kept critical services running during a disruption in January 2026.

Its worst security lapse was internal. On 2 August 2019 Monzo found that it had been recording some customers' PINs in encrypted log files that its engineers could access. It fixed the apps within a day, deleted the data, and asked the affected customers, under a fifth of its UK base, to change their PINs at a cash machine. Monzo said no one outside the company had access and it found no fraud linked to the bug.

Fraud is the bigger day-to-day risk. Monzo reimbursed £59.6 million of fraud losses in the year to March 2026, 85% more than the year before, the first full year of the UK's mandatory refund rules for authorised push payment scams. App features such as card freezing, payment notifications and an option to undo some mistaken transfers help, but scam calls pretending to be from the bank still work on many people.

How to keep your money safe at Monzo

1. Keep no more than £120,000 per person across all Monzo accounts and pots, or spread larger sums over unconnected banks such as Barclays.
2. Turn on app notifications and never move money to a "safe account" because a caller tells you to. Monzo will not ask you to.
3. Keep a card from another bank for days when an app or card network is down.
4. Treat investments and pensions through Monzo separately from savings: they can fall in value and are not covered by the deposit limit.

How we scored it

Liquidity (85) and deposit protectionDeposit insuranceA government-backed scheme that repays bank customers up to a set limit if their bank fails, such as the FDIC in the US or the FSCS in the UK.More in the glossary (80) are Monzo's strong factors. Capital (70) is high in ratio terms but comes without credit ratings or a long record. Conduct (52) reflects the 2025 FCA fine, and stability history (60) a bank that has grown fast but never been tested by a crisis.