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Comment by spking | Hacker News Reader

Monzo, Revolut and N26 (backed by Peter Thiel) are all splashing down around the same time in the U.S. to vie for the Challenger/Neo-Bank crown, where they will compete with:

-Simple/BBVA (https://www.simple.com/)

-Varo (https://www.varomoney.com/)

-Qapital (https://www.qapital.com/)

-Aspiration (https://www.aspiration.com/)

-Empower (https://empower.me/)

-MoneyLion (https://www.moneylion.com/)

-Acorns (Spend) (https://www.acorns.com/spend/)

-Chime (https://www.chimebank.com)

-Zero (https://zero.app/)

-Point (https://trypointbank.com/)

-Finn/Chase (https://www.chase.com/personal/finnbank)

-Marcus/Goldman Sachs (https://www.marcus.com/)

-Greenhouse/Wells Fargo (https://www.wellsfargo.com/greenhouse/)

-GoBank/Green Dot (https://www.gobank.com/)

-Square (Cash) (https://cash.app/)

-PayPal

-Apple (https://www.apple.com/apple-card/)

-(Maybe Amazon soon)?

(edit: links)

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In the UK there's also:

- Starling Bank - https://www.starlingbank.com/

- B / Clydesdale & Yorkshire Bank - https://www.youandb.co.uk/

- Monese - https://monese.com/

- Metro Bank - https://www.metrobankonline.co.uk/

Loads more too - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenger_bank

Metro seems to be having some problems

Yes. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/business-47609539

Basic Basel II rules. A bank that does THAT wrong is plain untrustworthy.

As a customer, a bank having problems can be good for you.

If they go under, the government protects all deposits, and there is a good chance you won't have to pay off any loans, or if you do, that the interest will be frozen for years till the bank is wound up.

Not always as we found out with the Icelandic banks

In India, I expect YC backed https://razorpay.com to come up with one soon, if it hasn't already.

Plus the other 8,800 banks that exist already https://www.fdic.gov/bank/statistical/stats/2018dec/industry...

N26 have some big troubles in germany. The BaFin (german abbr. for Federal Financial Supervisory Authority) is taking a closer look into N26 after several reports for "money disappearing" and having insufficient customer support.

If you want to roar with laughter for an hour, here's a wonderful talk from 2016 dissecting their horrifyingly broken security: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KopWe2ZpVQI

And which of these will do business with Cannabis companies?

Especially without requiring account payments of ~$3,000 per month OR ~3% of your deposits (yes this is what they are charging)

NorthBay Credit union in Santa Rosa, wants $3,000 per month and a litany of access rights to your financials that no other bank asks for.

Other CUs are seeking 3% of the total deposits in your account asa "service fee"

Fuck that.

All those options, and I still can't find a US bank with an API.

Which is why Plaid, Finicity and others are doing so well. Green Dot is working on this: https://www.greendot.com/baas/

What would you do with an API that can't already be done? I understand the hesitancy of giving a third party such as Plaid your bank credentials, however an exposed API to your bank seems to be a rather niche need.

As an example, Monzo was quite outspoken about their API at first, but it has since taken a backseat, presumably because they didn't see a huge need for it.

I use Plaid, but I'm not paying them (and not planning to) so I don't have much trust that they won't pull the rug out from me.

Maybe it's niche, but the number of programmers in the world continues to grow and if there was one that would be a powerful differentiator among that audience.

The way I see the banking api industry evolving is as follows:

Currently banks have been implementing API’s because it has been mandated by regulatory bodies. From their perspectives, the APIs are a money sink, and even worse, could make their customers less reliant on their infrastructure - increasing their chances of losing customers.

I see it differently, and predict that the landscape will change dramatically. Open banking APIs are going to enable a whole host of products and services - allowing customers to verify their income painlessly, or manage their investments and credit cards with minimal effort.

As the ecosystem of products around open banking grows, banks will begin to see the quality of their APIs as a strength, and a way to differentiate themselves from competitors. Customers could one day choose their bank based on how well it integrates with their smart phone, or favourite online market place, etc

Monzo are already capitalising on the opportunity with some very smart moves. They are using https://truelayer.com (a banking infrastructure company) to display their customers credit card’s balance and transactions within the Monzo app. Eventually users will be able to pay off their credit cards from within the Monzo app. Just imagine the possibilities!

In short, there are many exciting opportunities, and early adopters could win big.

>As an example, Monzo was quite outspoken about their API at first, but it has since taken a backseat, presumably because they didn't see a huge need for it.

You're not wrong.. but it's still very much functional and has received some recent additions (receipt API). I do wish they'd do more with it, though. I suspect the problem is that most customers just don't care.

The internal API is fairly trivial to begin using, if necessary.

> I suspect the problem is that most customers just don't care.

IMO the reason is they (perfectly rationally) realised after spending several million building an authorised bank that APIs are a pure downside scenario for them, i.e. intermediation risk. Why spend so much money to stand up a de novo bank and let everyone else capture the value? 99% of the value is top of stack. This is why no market in the world has provided 1st party banking APIs for retail products. It's taken regulators to do so in Europe and the results of that (predictably) fell short of what everybody had hoped. No criticism of Monzo for this. Based on their incentives this was the rational course of action.

You have a point, and I agree OB has been disappointing. I think there's a middle ground where you offer something that still provides value for personal use, attracts potential patnerships (see Flux) but doesn't give away the "keys to the kingdom" so others can profit off of your work without you, as a bank, benefitting from building the platform in the first place.

I suspect there are is a decent number of 'techies' and early adopters who found Monzo's API, despite its limitations, attractive to them. I've used it to save myself a bunch of time with expenses and it's nice to know that, if I wanted to, I could use the internal API too.

In its current state, Monzo could easily expand the existing personal API (which deliberately doesn't allow you to scale - only whitelisted user IDs can use your OAuth client) whilst minimising intermediation risk, provided that they didn't add the same endpoints to AISP API.

> What would you do with an API that can't already be done?

Build products that don't break every 5 minutes because they don't depend on sticky tape and bubblegum holding them together (screen scraping)

I like building my own automation to move money.

For example, use all unspent money at the end of each month to buy shares.

They're hard to find in the UK, too. The smart guys at Teller.io are solving that in the UK:

https://teller.io

Thanks for the mention. UK only… for now! ;)

We're hiring too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19547472

Congrats to Monzo on the round!

Is paypal a challenger bank or aspiring to be? AFAIK Don't think paypal offers anything more than transactions. No savings. No card.

PayPal is rolling out the Venmo debit card, and they also offer reward credit cards in partnership with Synchrony Bank.

Ahhh didn't know. Makes sense then. Thanks!

PayPal is not a bank in the US. Venmo is not a bank either.

I checked my paypal (UK) a couple of hours ago, and I was welcomed to an advertisement for a Paypal Credit Card.

I think it’s highly likely Monzo will be one of the winners. The leadership is strong, and customers absolutely love their product, as quantitatively measurable by their crowdfunding.

Great investment for YC, who also take credit for shaping the way Monzo has been led.

My only annoyance about Monzo is that I’ve been unable to invest so far. The only company that can stop Monzo now is Monzo.

Which ones are touting crypto-friendliness (aside from Cash already having integrated crypto into their own app)?

Yes, but they don't have emoji.

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