Hi Tony, whilst I can appreciate £100 is a lot to “open” an account, this is really to encourage people to use the card in their day to day lives, you can of course as @billinghamj mentions go straight to the cashpoint and withdraw the £100 on receiving your card and put it back in your current bank account, stick the card in your wallet and never use it again , but that then kind of really defeats the object of you wanting to get a card in the first place to try out a new kind of bank.
The more you use the card, the more you will realise how it actually lets you see how you are spending your hard earned money, and perhaps will lead you to changing some expensive habits that you didn’t realise were quite as expensive when using cash that you’ve withdrawn from the cashpoint and disappears to god knows where, or you wait for your monthly debit card statement from your bank to see how you’ve spent your 100 quid, or logging on to your internet banking and wait for a couple of days for your spend to be registered .
Again agreeing £100 is a lot , if it was £10 maybe you would use it once to buy a round of drinks and then not bother using it again, Mondo would have had all the trouble of setting your account up, sending you a card and then you use it once and then discard it without knowing what the card does to give an insight to your spending habits - which would help no one .
It always surprises me that a few people are shocked that they have to top up the Mondo card before they receive what is at the moment a pre paid debit card - and presumably this is not initially made clear on the sign up - and should perhaps be addressed by Mondo
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not being funny, but what did you want to do with the card, just keep it in your wallet ? this answer would also be useful to Mondo management for understanding why people apply for a pre paid card and are then “shocked” that they have to put an amount of money on it to use it
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being self employed and only using the card to pay bills - I would suggest this would be ideal for you ( whilst not being an actual business account
) You initially top up with 100 quid , withdraw 90 quid and then as and when you need to pay bills top up within 1 minute with as much as you need and the touch of a couple of buttons pay your bill - all your bill spends can then be exported to a spreadsheet to see all your bill expenses every month - accounts done- what could be simpler ?