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James Cook 05 August 2019 4:03pm BST Digital bank Monzo has tested charging customers up to £7.50 per month over a year for its new metal bank card. The branchless bank has tested charging
the fee upfront as a £90 charge or in monthly installments, along with alternative prices of £70 and £80 broken down into monthly payments over 12 months. The charge for the metal card will
be on top of the minimum fee of £6 a month for Monzo's premium Monzo Plus service. A source close to the company said that Monzo will favour a monthly subscription for the card, and has
dropped the idea of charging an up-front fee for the card. The company could also add new features specific to the metal card. A Monzo employee told customers in its online forum that
“final pricing has not been decided yet” for its metal cards. The premium card will only be available to Monzo Plus customers who receive extra features including earning interest on their
account balance and discounts. Monzo recently doubled the starting price of its Plus subscription after chief executive Tom Blomfield told The Telegraph that he felt his business had
“fluffed” the launch of the service. “I think we got the launch messaging wrong, very honestly,” he said in May. Rival financial technology firms including Revolut and Curve already charge
customers to use metal cards which come bundled with extra features. Revolut charges £12.99 a month or £120 a year for its Revolut Metal service, which gives customers a concierge service
and cashback on their purchases. Technology intelligence - newsletter promo - EOA The testing of the metal Monzo cards comes as the company admitted on Monday that some of its employees
could have accessed thousands of customers’ PIN codes due to a technical issue. The bank said that it accidentally stored some customers’ PIN codes in encrypted log files which are
accessible to Monzo engineers. It added that the incident affected less than a fifth of its 2m customers and that it had deleted the information. The company wrote in a blog post that it had
seen no evidence that the incident had led to any fraud carried out using Monzo accounts.