Earlier this year we showed you your Year in Monzo, which let you see where you spend the most.
Hey @McDonaldsUK you might want to have a word with @monzo. They’ve just told me I went to your place 133 times last year. I surely have to cut back my cheeseburger intake! 😂🤦♂️🍔🍟 P.S sorry @GreggsOfficial pic.twitter.com/ckVciz8jTv
— Matt Brennan (@mattbrennan88) January 8, 2019
And you seemed to find it interesting! But because it showed you places you go to most often, we saw lots of the same names come up time and time again (Pret, anyone?).
An amazing community of more than two million people now use Monzo. And we wanted to highlight some of the lesser-known places you love.
Introducing: Trending Spending!
So we’ve put together a list of places that people who use Monzo loved last month.
They’re the places you've been going to lots recently, beyond all the big chains and familiar names. They’re not necessarily the most popular places overall (sorry Greggs), but your favourite haunts and neighbourhood gems.
Let us know what you think and share your favourite places using #TrendingSpending!
We've explained how we work out what's trending below.
We’ve started this month with London, because it’s where the most people use Monzo. But if you find this interesting, we’d love to do your city next! Let us know in the community forum or tell us on Twitter.
See what's trending in:
How we work out what’s trending
When you pay at a shop or café with your card, we keep a record of lots of relevant information about the transaction. And we use this data to do things like put your spending in the right category, and show you information in your app (like the address and logo of the merchant).
This data also lets us understand how Monzo customers’ spending patterns vary across different merchants over time.
So to identify places that are trending, we looked for places that aren’t just outright popular, but that have a loyal following.
To make this post, we took all the transactions Monzo customers made in May, and analysed the data using a technique that’s usually used to identify meaningful words in documents. Instead, we wanted to see if we could use it to find meaningful merchants in your spending data. We use anonymised transaction data to work out which places are popular, so we're not using any personal data for the analysis itself.
This method is called term-frequency inverse document frequency (TF-IDF). It essentially creates a score for each merchant in different post codes, that rewards places where people have been frequently, but penalises places based on how popular they are overall. This lets us discover places that you love and have been visiting lots recently, beyond the familiar chains that everyone knows.
Did you find this interesting? Tell us what you think in the community! We'd love to do more cities outside London, so let us know where we should look next 😃