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Comment by RickS | Hacker News Reader

I'm very hopeful for Monzo, with some caveats.

They have a lot of fascinating and useful DNA having gotten started in the UK before the US. The UK's regulatory environment for digital banking is leagues ahead of America's, w/r/t data access, APIs, etc. If they can persist UK style data features through their American rollout, they'll have something no other American bank currently offers.

While my strong suspicion is that the UK's push for digitization / interoperability in the financial sector stems from Orwellian nanny-state ambitions that would be right at home in China's playbook, it would be fantastic if we could somehow manage to empower customers with access to their own information without similarly empowering data-thirsty governments to surveil and oppress.

The scary parts are probably going make headway regardless, so cheers to the silver lining in the interim.

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This is where they actually bring value right? - Delivering a good banking product outside of the UK.

Because as a UK customer I see no reason to switch after trying Monzo for a couple of months.

Positives:

- a nicer mobile banking app

Negatives:

- no credit cards and no option to top up using a credit card from another bank

- no physical branches

Everything else is comparable to most other banks in the UK. Which isn't bad, just nothing worth switching banks for.

I wouldn't undervalue the effect of getting a notification every time your account gets used with additional details and the trivial ability to look back over past transactions whenever you want.

I'm constantly surprised by how useful the app is.

That alone has been something that keeps on Monzo. I once had someone try to buy a flight with my card - I immediately got a notification, froze my card to prevent further payments, and had the whole thing resolved within 20 minutes of the first payment. With a conventional account likely the first I’d have known of it was when I tried to make a payment and it was declined, and I’d then have to unpick everything.

I’ll also admit I have on occasions gone through my transaction history the morning after to work out which bar I ended up in.

> - no physical branches

Massive positive for me. I've never had a good experience going to a physical bank branch (if they're ever even open), and now I'll never have to go again

I recently visited my local branch after shooting myself in the foot when re-installing their app and locking my account.

After waiting a couple of minutes, a lovely lady sorted out my problem with no fuss at all.

I agree, mostly I never need to step foot in a branch but sometimes it helps to be reminded that there are advantages of doing business 'face to face'.

I agree. If a bank has physical branches to fall back on, they can squander the online/phone story. This has happened with another bank I use which has a website with a broken account creation form and phone lines that just die.

For most banks, they might as well not have any branches as I can't get to them at a reasonable opening hour and they have no incentive to change that.

> I agree. If a bank has physical branches to fall back on, they can squander the online/phone story

And meanwhile First Direct has a mediocre website and terrible mobile app experience when compared to the likes of Halifax, TSB, RBS, Barclays, all of which are sub-par compared to the likes of Monzo or Starling as far as the app experience goes.

Then again, Monzo and Starling don't have a desktop experience, so good luck if you wan't to do anything more than just looking at a few transactions on the go.

Taking away the option of doing something is positive?

One of my bank accounts didn't let me change my address online. I had to go to the bank and do it.

A branchless bank must have an alternative

So what you actually need is the ability to change your address online. Not the ability to go into a physical branch removed.

> no option to top up using a credit card from another bank

Can you top up your HSBC account with a credit card from another bank? A Monzo account is just another bank account.

> no physical branches

Is this really a con? Last time I visited a branch (Nationwide), I was told to just go online and fill in the forms. Monzo let you deposit cash and cheques at the post office - my post office has better opening hours, shorter queues, and there are more of them than branches of my specific bank.

> Can you top up your HSBC account with a credit card from another bank? A Monzo account is just another bank account.

That's a good point. But with the low exchange rate and a modern app, they're also (willingly or not) competing with Revolut. I can top up a Revolut account with a credit card.

That's also a fair point - the idea of a bank account has been muddied. Monzo had "pots" which all gain interest, and they come from the same account. I'm not aware of any other bank accounts that offer embedded savings accounts.

I do think that comparing a bank account to a prepaid card is a little too much of a stretch thoigh.

Revolut isn't just a prepaid card. What they offer is very similar to Monzo, even if they started out differently. That's why they're competing with each other and it's fair to compare them.

I have to say, I'm actually a little muddied on what revolut is. They claim to be a current account, except they're not fscs protected, but they do have some interesting parallels and additions to a current account.

Can you get emergency cash from the Post Office though? Cause I got mugged recently and was able to walk into HSBC and get money out while I waited for a replacement card. I fear if I closed that account and went all-in on Monzo I'd be locked out.

That's a very good point and one I hadn't considered. In this day and age in the UK I'd consider it irresponsible to only have one bank account. The TSB outage is a prime example of what can go wrong and leave you stuck. For me, I keep roughly a months worth of expenses in a high street bank with a card in the drawer, but touch wood I've never had to use it so I don't know how well it works. Before I used Starling (I actually don't use Monzo - but they're comparable for all intents and purposes) I had two bank accounts with different networks and did the same thing there, FWIW.

> Monzo let you deposit cash and cheques at the post office

Not quite. You can deposit at any PayPoint location (mostly corner shops and the like), not Post Offices [0]. They also charge £1 for each deposit and the maximum deposit is £300. This is not an issue for me (I rarely see or use cash), but it would be for some.

Having made my first deposit at the weekend, the main issue is that the shopkeepers have no idea how to accept a deposit. I tried four places, and only managed to succeed in the end because I instructed the shopkeeper how to do it.

[0] https://monzo.com/blog/2018/11/21/deposit-cash

My bad - it's actually starling [0] who do post office.

[0] https://www.starlingbank.com/blog/post-office-deposits/

For me the killer feature is foreign currency transactions with no fees at the MasterCard exchange rate, both online and abroad. My "traditional" bank charges me a flat fee and a percentage for any transactions in other currencies.

Yep, that's a massive positive that I forgot to mention. In that space they're competing with Revolut rather than the traditional banks. Many people's setup will be traditional bank for everyday banking + Revolut for travel. Monzo can potentially replace both if it gains traction and people trust it enough.

I don't know what the MasterCard exchange rate is. However, someone recently told me regarding their credit card: "they give me the wholesale exchange rate, which is great". It turned out not to be so great (~1% wide market). It's good not to pay an additional fee/spread on top, but it can still be a poor deal overall.

This is their convertor below.

$10000 dollars cost £7,867.91

I googled $100 USD to GBP and it comes out as: £7,859.50

Percentage difference: 0.106947%

https://www.mastercard.co.uk/en-gb/consumers/get-support/con...

Google isn’t really an authority. The Google rate could be bad and MasterCard 0.1% worse. They could be from different times. Also, the MasterCard site says indicative only - if I convert the amount back again, MasterCard claims they are giving me free money.

GBPUSD spot is 0.002% wide (so you’d expect to pay ~0.001% for a single, instant transaction up to several million). It’s not actually too difficult to access this through a brokerage.

That said, if you could really get 0.1% from them it’d probably be considered good at retail.

The Halifax Clarity card does this, and they have highstreet branches.

they have highstreet branches

Is that a good thing?

I agree, Monzo is great for small transactions and travelling but I'm not rushing to switch from Barclays as my main bank.

For credit cards, check Tandem Bank. Worked there until a couple of weeks ago, they do several credit cards including one with 0.5% cashback on all transactions. Plus the usual no fx fees etc.

Over the last day since you wrote this I opened an account with Tandem, had to start a savings account with them even though I wasn't interested in it, applied for the cashback card, got declined despite of a good credit score, and closed my account. The person who I contacted about the account closure was ending his messages with ":D". Just a bad experience overall and I wouldn't recommend it.

I think calling the app nicer is an understatement. It's lightyears ahead of other banks.

The use abroad is fantastic and it's the reason I originally got their prepaid card. Some UK banks do offer a similar service with no fee and/or low exchange rate, I think Nationwide's clarity card is one but that's a credit card so withdrawing cash is costly (IIRC).

I also like Monzo's saving pots idea but since they apparently can't provide any proper financial statements to go along with them they are pretty useless to me. I really don't understand how that is supposed to work if you need to complete a tax return.

My local bank branch closed down last month. And to be honest it was a frustrating experience of queueing up to talk to someone who sometimes knew less than what I read from the website.

So, considering how trivial it is to switch current account in the UK, I'm looking at it from the other angle - why would I stay with my current old-school bank?

Customer support. It's absolutely light years ahead of HSBC etc

For me, having no physical branches has been ace. When I was with barclays, I could call them up, spend 45 minutes on the phone to someone, only to be told I have to go to a branch to get a statement (or something stupid like that). I'd then walk to a branch, stand in line for 20 minutes, to be told they can't do that at that branch and I'd have to ring up some other number. That sort of thing happened regularly enough (probably twice in my last year) to make me lose trust in the competance of the people I was speaking to.

Monzo having 1 point of contact means they can't push you off onto someone else/a branch/a different phone number etc. And every time I've used the help chat on there I've had me issues resolved rapidly.

When I was in mexico, a restaurants card machine said a payment didn't go through, but my monzo app said it did. So i kept the receipt and did the transaction again. This time their card machine said it worked. I kept the receipt for a week in case the £60 showed back up in my account but it didn't. Within 2 minutes on the chat with monzo, £60 was just put back into my account. No fuss. I guarantee you couldn't pick up a phone/go to a branch with a standard bank and get the money back that quickly

I've opened a joint account with Monzo and with 1st direct. Guess which one took an hour on the phone and which one took 10 seconds in an app.

I've switched all my banking to them. So much better than high street banks and I haven't had to talk to a single person.

I thought the open banking and connectivity drive came from Europe's Payment Services Directives, and was EU wide.

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