In our latest Meet Mondo, I chat to Leah Templeman. She has been with Mondo since day one and currently runs the prepaid card operations. Follow her at @templemanleah on Twitter.
Hi Leah! Can you tell us a bit more about what you do at Mondo?
Anything and everything! It varies from creating our financial model to travelling around the country picking up and distributing cards. Currently I am predominantly focussing on the operations of our prepaid programme. This covers setting up the programme, card operations (printing and distribution - card printing machines are so cool!), customer support, compliance and new partnerships.
What does a typical day look like?
I don’t think there is such a thing as a “typical day”. I can tell you what I’ve been doing over the last few weeks though! Generally the first thing I do when I wake up is log on to check what customer support we’ve had come in overnight. I’ll shoot off first replies to these and make my way into the office for our daily 10@10 (a quick 10 minute catch up on what everyone is working on that day). I normally then spend my morning catching up on emails and checking in with our external suppliers. In an ideal world, in the afternoon I’ll get stuck into a meatier project like analysing all the customer support queries we’ve had or planning how we can implement posting cards to people, although this sometimes get pushed back with so much to do!
How did you come to be working at Mondo?
I did a couple of years as a management consultant - learnt a lot and met some great people but decided I wanted to be more involved in the actual running of a business. I knew Tom, our CEO, from university and he mentioned his startup was recruiting.* It’s such an exciting venture and I was sold immediately. The rest is history!
What’s the most challenging part of your work?
Definitely balancing all the various tasks which all seem to need to be done urgently. It’s hard to really switch off when there is so much to do and you really care about the product and the customers. I need to improve my ability to step back, take a deep breath and realise the world is not going to end if some things aren’t done for a day or two. Luckily, the Mondo team is very supportive and pretty good at giving me some perspective :)
What do you get up to outside of work?
I love sport, both playing and watching. I play for a lacrosse team here in London (go Putney!) and generally enjoy being pretty active. Last year I felt like I wasn’t doing enough exercise so I signed up for the Reykjavik Marathon. Realising that this task was too mammoth to really be much of an incentive to get going (luckily it turns out you don’t need to train that much to just get round), this year I have signed up for the Hackney Half. I’m also attempting to learn German - ja, genau!
What upcoming feature are you most excited about?
Being able to load the card into Apple Pay! I’m just about to upgrade my phone and I’d love to be able to use Mondo straightaway in Apple Pay. I also think it will mean we can do some pretty cool things around onboarding…
* I should probably point out Tom had nothing to do with my interview process!
We recently updated our name to Monzo! Read more about it here.