ATM Fees Abroad: Asking the Monzo Community to decide pricing

I think that a fee free first £200 with anything over is the best option as it rewards the casual user and places the onus to pay on the worst offenders.

I would be interested however to know how you plan to calculate months? i.e. a rolling month or a calendar month?

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I’m happy for Option 3 or as an alternative, charge an optional monthly fee for those of us who do Travel a lot.
I use my Monzo card abroad a lot, but I’m pretty much cashless so I tend not to withdraw cash, but I’d still happily stump up a monthly fee to avoid charges and help fund Monzo.

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One of the things that I liked the most about your card was no fees for taking out cash. I am not sure if I will continue to use it if you will start charging for this.

In my opinion there should be option 4 with much higher monthly allowance like 400 or yearly allowance like 2400.

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Fair enough but wouldn’t 200/month be exactly the same in terms of costs for Monzo over the course of a year?

If I had a £200 / month allowance I think I’d use that and then withdraw using another card provider that offers free withdrawals. Or just use a travel card all together.

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If you go abroad often, or even live in a european country, you rarely actually have to get cash out, to be honest – a surprising amount can be done card-only in most of europe. Even in the most remote areas in western europe, you wont need that much in cash.

It’s mostly a holdover from when you needed to bring cash with you for a holiday — you can get by with a card; you just need to drop the mentality that your card isn’t going to be accepted, heh

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I think this is a good idea, but perhaps the Monzo data guys would be able to figure out what threshold that yearly allowance would need to be at to break even.

If most people only travel abroad 1 or 2 times a year, then this would benefit them. Anyone who travels on a far more regular basis would then need to start paying for these transactions.

I think this logic works if Monzo continues to be a bank and not an international travel card, as it has set out to do.

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Option 3 is perfect. As a student it’s just the right sweet spot for quick holidays abroad. Imho if you’re withdrawing significantly more than that, you’re closer to the higher spending minority - and the blog post was absolutely right, if you want free withdrawals abroad go and use starling or something, and let monzo make a great, sustainable product

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Option 4: Only allow active UK users free withdrawals outside the UK. charge inactive UK users 2% for overseas withdrawals.

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No, because most people’s travel is sporadic. Our average customer maybe goes on 2 or 3 trips a year. In theory it’s possible to get £2400 of free withdrawals in a year, but in reality it’s pretty unlikely that the normal customer would withdraw £200 every month for 12 months.

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Hey Monzo,

You said that a minority of the users use the cards just to benefit for the 0% commission ATM transactions abroad and when they come back to the UK and stop using Monzo.

How about the ATM transaction allowance abroad to be proportional to the use of Monzo and spending domestically (UK). So loyal users will be rewarded and usage & retention will skyrocket as they directly benefit from using Monzo in the UK. And this acts as a fail safe mechanism for people who exploit Monzo by solely using it abroad.

Kind regards,
Michalis

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Clearly as a business you have to charge a certain amount to offset these costs, it’s been fun while it’s been free and investors have been picking up the tabs (the big boy investors not us little crowdies)

£200 seems fair… Revolut have similar costs but I believe for all ATM withdrawals.

This should drive all of us to use our cards more in retailers than taking out cash and then spending it…

Some countries cash is king and, well, we’ll just have to wait for them to catch up :wink: :world_map:

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I’d imagine that the average user would likely be withdrawing less than £400 at international ATMs annually, in which case option 3 will work out cheaper than option 2 for most people.

If you guys aren’t making a loss on that then it’s probably going to keep the majority of people happy.

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Option 4, for every £1000 spent in the UK you get an extra £200 of charge free withdrawals abroad. Therefore those using the card consistently in the UK benefit and those who aren’t don’t

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Maybe if the chareg was exactly whet the charge was to Monzo for the cardholder’s withdrawal? Is it like 0,20€ per transaction in Germany or something similar?

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Most of Western Europe but Germany is a problem for using MasterCard in shops, bars and restaurants - even in the big cities of Berlin, Hamburg , Munich and Cologne… They love cash so I always end up at an ATM when there.

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I’m not sure how easy something like this would be to enforce fairly. It also feels a little at odds with our commitment to find a solution which works for the community as a whole, rather than targeting specific groups of users.

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We’re moving to an ever more cashless society, and a motivator for this would be to limit free withdrawals to £200. That’s more than enough to pay for the odd taxi or restaurant that doesn’t take card. 3% after that is reasonable given the cost to Monzo.

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Option 1 is the most sensible. It has already been noted that the current policy has likely changed the way people use the prepaid Monzo card. Any policy change will also have a corresponding behaviour change (when viewed in the round over many customers). The best policy would therefore would be the one where there is no net impact upon business costs from any drift in usage into the future.

An honest charge based upon real costs would also underline the values of the Monzo banking business.

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Just 13% of customers account for more than 85% of our total ATM costs in any given month. Many of these people signed up to Monzo because of the great exchange rates and fee-free ATM withdrawals abroad, but don’t keep the card once they’re back in the UK.

What about offering a better rate or higher free allowance for people that actually use your card as their main card as you get percentage from each card payment.
Fe: For £1000 spend on a card you get a 1 free atm withdrawal abroad.

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Really like options 1 & 2 – because they are simple and straight forward to get onboard with RE mitigating the cost to Monzo. Ultimately I went for option 1, because I’m likely to travel to the EU more than I am to far away exotic locations outside the EU – suspect that is probably true of the average Brit, and therefore while option 2 makes sense as I mentioned above – I would still kind of be subsidising people that travelled to those exotic locations more frequently than the average.

I thought option 3 was interesting – my only question to Monzo would be whether that’s financially sustainable – in the same way that options 1& 2 appear to be? You could easily imagine a scenario where people travelling together pool their £200’s so they don’t go over their limits and Monzo doesn’t actually recoup as much of their outlay?

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