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Year in Monzo 2020

Year in Monzo is an interactive web based experience that provides customers with unique insights in to how they spend and saved over the past year.

Moving to D3.js

In past editions of Year in Monzo, graphs have been powered by the Google Chart API. Although these have worked well for us, the desire to add more complex graphs meant we needed a different solution.

D3.js gave us this flexibility and allowed us to create more customised visiulations.

New data points to reflect 2020

2020 for many was a hectic year, which had a huge impact on how people managed and spent their money. With a national lockdown in the UK in March, most customers saw a drop in the frequency of in-person (in a physical shop) spending.

Getting the tone of this graph right was important. We felt that removing labels and values from the graph and treating it more as an illustration helped to soften some of the curves, but whilst still providing a strong enough nod towards what had been an awful year.

This graph ended up becoming one of the most popular parts of the experience with hundreds of customers sharing their graphs on social media.

An example graph showing online vs in-person spending

Technical architecture

Our final system ended up reflecting how most of our systems work at Monzo. An entry API which manages authentication and authorization makes a request to the main data service, which pulls the given data for the user. This is then enriched with data from other downstream services such as merchant names and logos. This allowed us to ensure that the logos displayed for a given merchant would always be up to date, as they are requested on each request.

Technical architecture

Generating 8 million unique images

As part of the experience, we pre-generated two personalised images for each user which contained stats about their spending.

Using a headless browser to screenshot an HTML file seemed like the most viable approach, as it would give us a large amount of flexibility over the layout and design of the final image, as it was ultimately just HTML and CSS. However running a headless browser and making 8 million requests to it ended up creating some large engineering problems.

We decided to pre-generate all of the images to reduce the extra load on the platform during launch. After scaling the service up, we managed to generate all 8 million images in a few hours.

Launching

After several rounds of internal testing, we finally released to our customers.

Despite the viral mechanic built in, we had still built several levers in to the release process that would allow us to increase and decrease the number of people seeing their Year in Monzo.

The graph below, which shows the number of requests per second to Monzo on launch-day vs the previous day, is testament to the work of the platform engineers who built a system that could manage a 3-fold increase in requests, without fail.

Requests for Year in Monzo 2020

(credit to Suhail Patel who created this graph)