Building a Fake Bank Inside a Real Bank

Now that everyone’s back to school, I can finally catch you up, dearest LinkedIn reader, on the podcast conversations Jonny and I have been having throughout August.

First up, James Storer, Staff Product Designer at Monzo. This was a fun one covering everything from building a fake bank (inside a real bank), vibecoding from holiday, and the garden as a spaceship.

Some practical takeaways:

1. “Temu Monzo” and building a fake bank to prototype with instead.

James’s team built a React Native clone of the Monzo app that uses the real design system, with fake accounts and simulated transactions, so AI-built ideas can be explored quickly and land in front of users without touching production. This was built after experiments with Lovable and Figma Make fell short, leading to what James describes as “Temu Monzo”. A basic UI that looks nothing like the actual Monzo product (except the splash of hot coral brand colour).

2. The payoff isn’t efficiency, it’s certainty.

Prototypes now go up to senior leadership alongside the strategy bets in roadmap planning. One squad even went from jamming on designs to user-tested prototypes in a week. While the speed is helpful, it’s more about reaching certainty faster. That way you can be more concrete in the product decisions to invest in, and de-risk leadership prioritisation at the same time.

3. Kids’ bank balances on the living-room telly.

James’s colleague, had put his children’s Monzo balances on tiny M5Stack sticks because kids’ accounts have no phone to check. James copied the idea for his kids, then built a Samsung TV app showing the family calendar, to-do lists and their bank balances. “Even if my wife refuses to open it, I’m still proud that I did it.”

4. He went to Config looking for a reason to open Figma daily again.

These days James mostly points agents at Figma rather than designing in it. The file has become a context store. He thinks code layers on the canvas are the right long-term answer, with a caveat: “auto layout never taught anyone Flexbox, so code layers should teach commits and branches rather than hide them.”

5. AI lowers the floor, the ceiling is shaped by your existing strengths.

He can now prompt motion, ask BigQuery, drop in a video to reverse-engineer an interaction, but none of it makes him a motion designer or an engineer. James is loving the freedom to blur the lines between disciplines, but keeps returning to these distinct disciplines as fundamental to building truly great products.

We released three more episodes throughout the rest of August, including Randy, Patrick and Matt. Stay tuned throughout the week for key takeaways from those conversations.

Listen at nearfuture.works/podcast.