Annual Report 2020

I think so. In its current offering all they do is let you speculate on the price within the app. You can’t send, receive or do anything at all with it.

Assume that I know nothing about crypto trading (easy assumption in this case)

What is “speculating” here then, if not a way to make Revolut (and, presumably, yourself, somewhere along the line) some moooney?

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I have very strong views on the Annual Report, and they are this:

Honestly, not bothered by anything that’s in the report. Monzo are being more open than a lot of banks are about their current situation, and it’s a terrible situation across the globe - not just in banking.

For me, my money is in Monzo (and a small amount in Starling), and if anything goes wrong with them I’ll have a new account set up within a day and use the FSCS protection to move money.

Monzo is, and will continue to be, my main bank because I find the tools, and mobile application they offer really intuitive and useful, it’s probably the best mobile app available.

But that’s just my opinion. :man_shrugging:

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Yep that’s all you can do. No increased risk of money laundering or chance of use in other illegal activities.

While I don’t know anything about the BoE stance on crypto that is the reason other banks have usually given for not wanting to be involved in crypto activities.

Where did the coins come from? How did they get there? How do you make any money if they don’t leave there?

Confused of Portsmouth

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It’s essentially a derivative on the price of the various cryptocurrencies they offer.

If Revolut hedges their exposure using actual crypto, options, futures or something else I don’t know but there’s already institutions with a UK banking license doing that. What’s relevant from a risk perspective is that you can’t send or receive crypto form third parties. For all I know that might be the reason they’ve chosen to do it this way.

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I’ve had a look at their IFRS 9 macroeconomic scenarios in the credit risk note and it indicates that they could lose a further £75m in credit losses if their worst case projection (“downside 2” on page 131) comes to pass.

That loss is based on unemployment peaking at 8% which isn’t far from where the Bank of England pitched their best guess a few days ago.

Of course no one has a crystal ball, but there must have been significant thought and work put into those numbers. The auditor would have had to think they were materially appropriate too.

Therefore, it’s fair to assume that, if the BoE forecasts are not too doomsday, there will be further significant losses reported by Monzo in the next set of accounts.

So let’s all hope they have a plan for that and that things don’t go as badly as in the most recent BoE projection. So much uncertainty in those numbers…

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Oh look, The Times are wringing more of of the same story with some of the same journo names attached:

Can’t see the rest of the story, so cannot advise if they added to mentions of twenty year olds with references to avocados

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Key parts:

The bank is in the process of finalising another £40 million fundraising, according to sources.

Last week the troubled bank said that it was looking into the effectiveness of its anti-money laundering processes after the Financial Conduct Authority conducted its own review.

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Second part seems to be rehashed from their first story, but new raise is interesting

Can go around the same conversations again, oh joy!

Here’s a subscriber link to The Times article so you can bypass the paywall

Ironically, the main story in the same section today is

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Thanks for the links, but they didn’t seem to get me any further through the story

From my recollection of getting links like that before, they are one time only tokens. So the first person to click the link here would’ve seen the story, and the rest of us out out of luck.

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I was able to read both of those Times articles from the links.

The ‘useful’ information I got was:

  • Monzo has a capital position over £175 million.
  • It is possibly planning to raise £40 million more.
  • Monzo is looking into the effectiveness of its anti-money laundering processes after an FCA review.
  • Monzo had 366 complaints to Financial Ombudsman between July and December 2019 - 21% upheld and 140 the 6 months before with a 29% upheld. Many related to customers having issues accessing accounts.
  • Monzo isn’t great with fraud cases it seems to the journalist.
  • Some venture capitalist thinks that Monzo’s failure is inevitable while an investor isn’t worried due to cost savings being done.
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Thank you kindly Kevyn for the summary

I really have no historical context for this. Is that good? Bad? Indifferent? That actually sounds not too bad to me in percentage terms for complaints that reached that stage :man_shrugging:

At a quick glance, the link below doesn’t make good reading for Monzo.

Monzo seem to have a much higher number of complaints per 1000 accounts compared to their major competitors which is concerning as I would imagine it’s customer base should actually be less likely to complain then those of legacy banks.

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I’m more concerned that Coutts have more complaints than Monzo. Does this table suggest Monzo would better handle my millions?

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Barclays and (my legacy bank) HSBC have around double that as a percentage of Monzo, who admittedly have double that as a percentage of Starling

I’ll have to make of that what I can

At terrible thing to do with data like this. It’s not the quick glance that matters, it’s how it compares to everyone else in context.

Granted, I’m no expert - but I plugged in the name of every high street bank I could think of, and they almost all had a much greater percentage of upheld complaints than Monzo did. Then I plugged in the name of every ‘major competitor’ that I could think of, assuming that ‘major competitor’ means ‘fintech bank’, and only Starling were represented (because of the rest not actually being banks, I hazard). And granted, the numbers are lower for Starling, but there’s still a lack of context for why this is the case. Maybe it’s because Starling do a better job of being a bank and dealing with complaints - or maybe Starling have far fewer customers, and maybe of the customers they do have, far fewer use them as their main bank.

There’s not enough information to draw conclusions just from one set of data.

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