Every year, various tech companies roll out Wrapped-style reviews of your consumer habits for the last 12 months, giving you a brightly design-fuelled overview of just how much of a trash pile you are. What kind of listening personality did you have on Spotify? What was everyone watching on Pornhub? What were the biggest dating trends on Tinder?
But there’s one place that shows us truly as we are, exposed under the unflattering spotlight of our actual, unhackable behaviour — banking apps.
For 2023, British online bank Monzo has released an undeniably well animated but deeply confronting year-end wrap in the app, aggregating the data of its 7.5 million customers, and showing you where you spent your hard-earned cash for the year. And despite that cute design, the results are not pretty.
“This is the story of how you Monzo’d your way through 2023 like nobody else,” the app begins, before pummelling you with the categories you spent the most in, which mates you split the bill with the most, the places you preferred to shop, and where you ordered food from the most (wow, no thank you).
The screenshots for my own spending are too embarrassing to share with you, although some brave souls have shared their own spending results on Twitter/X.
Sure, it’s a way for Monzo to liven up your finance hub with some personal data, and some folks might really benefit from seeing their spending habits in order to budget. But staring at hard, cold evidence of my take-out habits really isn’t the year-end air punch I was looking for. As Twitter/X user Sasha writes, “why does Monzo wrapped feel like I’m in my underwear in the town square and all the villagers are pointing and laughing at me.”
On the other hand, having a “fun” year-end wrap-up of spending habits feels intensely privileged during the ongoing cost of living crisis in the UK — if you’re in a financially stable enough position to have a lightly amusing Monzo wrap-up, it’s important to acknowledge that.
In the meantime, check out Mashable’s wrap-ups for the year, which have no idea where you ordered your 2am burger from.
