Theyâre working on itâŚ
Tandem just launched
A couple of highlights -
The startup will launch the app in waves to 10,000 early adopters
Users will initially be able to add any existing UK bank account to it. They can then monitor their spending and will receive suggestions as to how they can save money, stashing their Tandemâs own savings account, its first financial product.
So another app offering these âsolutionsâ but at least they have products to offer
Tandemâs own current account, loans and credit cards will also soon follow.
Iâd still rather have a choice of all providerâs products.
It has raised ÂŁ22m
Then some incorrect figures for no. Monzo users
Monzo was granted its banking license in August with imminent plans to launch a current account in the coming months. It already boasts more than 30,000 beta users of a pre-paid debit card
(itâs actually over 65k now so the speed of growth is picking up )
But CityAM didnât allow me to post that comment & link
Got my email notification from tandem. Still need to wait for an invite and access starts in early 2017
Following on from @alexsâs post about Tandem, this Finextra article also mentions Loot, which
has just closed a further ÂŁ2.5m funding round and intends to open to a 20,000 strong waiting list of prospective customers next week.
Wow where did they come from? Iâve never seen them mentioned but they already have a pretty well developed app & it looks like they got started less than 12 months ago
Only thing I canât see is a mention of an open APIâŚ
@j800rob spotted them back in July.
Bold comments from their founder/CEO:
Purdue believes Loot has an advantage. The startup has chosen not to apply for a banking licence, instead using an E-Money licence and partnering with other companies to offer banking services.
Purdue says: âFinancially it doesnât make sense. Weâre so much faster, so much cheaper to run. From a compliance perspective itâs no different. Weâre working on products you would expect a bank to do because we can use other partners to do that.
âOut of the challenger bank world, weâve got the most functionality. Weâve got our own sort code and account number system so any user can make a payment to anyone in the banking network. We use Faster Payments. Weâve got direct debits. Weâve got savings accounts as well built in. We call it Loot Goals, you add a savings goal and then weâll tell you how much money you need to put in each day to reach that goal.â
Loot raised the ÂŁ2.5 million from existing investors SpeedInvest and Global Founders Capital. Both are European (Austria and Germany, respectively) â did Brexit affect fundraising?
The EU vote âactually made it a stronger case not to go for the licence,â Purdue says. âEven when we hit scale next year, we still wonât because it financially wonât make sense. Monzo and Tandem have spent millions on getting this licence that doesnât give them any extra functionality than weâve got and probably canât go through Europe. Itâs pretty crazy.
Ahh ok, we can ignore them then
Interesting to have a benchmark for the pace of development when creating an API & applying for a banking license vs when youâre not.
Another firm with an E-Money licence that seems to be doing well is WeSwap. A MasterCard for travellers where you buy money off each other rather than from banks or exchange bureaux. They are currently crowdsourcing further expansion thru Seedrs.
Loot is apparently political: https://medium.com/@Lootapp/us-election-2016-what-the-hell-is-happening-bd93ade9fd81#.p31g1evq8
I like loot more after reading that then I did before.
Interview with one of the co-founders of Atom -
Which explains how different their business model is from Monzoâs for the latecomers, like me. Itâs also a great example of a new bank trying not to sound like a legacy bank & completely failing (in my not so humble opinion).
A couple more stats, to put the numbers that have been mentioned in previous comments in this thread in context -
Atom has:
- Raised ÂŁ135m of capital
- About 250 full time staff
Lootâs arguments against not holding a banking license seems quite strong to me? Are they really at a disadvantage by not being a bank? If they can build a current account experience on top of another banks current account is that a disadvantage at all?
Edit: presuming they build on top of a ânew ageâ banking stack rather than a legacy one - however Iâd assume there will be quite a few ânewâ banking stack as a service provider within a few years.
On a sidenote - Wirecard is killing it in the market - every startup seems to be using them. Looks like they are the platform for a lot of innovation (I hope whoever came up with their platform approach gets some recognition!)
Hereâs a pretty big one, from their website
The Prepaid Card is an electronic money product and although it is a product regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, it is not covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. No other compensation scheme exists to cover losses claimed in connection with the Prepaid Card. This means that in the event that Wirecard Card Solutions Ltd becomes insolvent your funds may become valueless and unusable and as a result you may lose your money.
Iâm guessing that thereâs also a limit to how much they can take in deposits too / what they can do with that money, due to regulations.
I was actually going to point out that being tied to Wirecard doesnât seem to be a particularly good thing. Following your point, they appear to be the best processor for startups.
But weâve seen the issues that Monzoâs had because of them (the minimum wait of 3-4 months to enable Apple Pay, as one example & outages as another) so once Monzo is no longer using their services, there should be a lot of benefits.
Ah I had thought from Lootâs vision they still intent to move away from Wirecard to a bank infrastructure that is covered by the FSCS but maybe I misunderstood.
If there is a bank that would allow such a model (they run the banking infrastructure whitelabeled on a modern banking stack) then it might actually be a competitive advantage to not be a bank yourself (e.g. the âbank marketplaceâ isnt even a bank at all its just an integrator)
A joint spending management account (similar to has been requested on Monzo in ideas before):
This is what Iâd really love to see from Monzo. We have (soon to be had) a Tesco Bank joint account for our âspending moneyâ and would love to use Monzo but at the moment weâre using two separate cards and playing âwhose turn is it to payâ based on whichever Monzo card has the most dosh left on it!
This is on the roadmap, though itâs probably a long way off because itâs not on the open roadmap -
Tomâs most recent comment on this (as far as I know) was during his Periscope chat (5:40 onwards)
& the rest of the team are fans of the idea tooâŚ
Oh yeah, I can definitely appreciate that itâs on the roadmap, but with it being a Tesco Bank account, you can see my more immediate need to get rid of this ASAP!
Simple has introduced shared accounts, their implementation looks pretty awesome.
Two cards, an extra shared account right next to your personal one: https://www.simple.com/company/announcing-simple-shared
But Simple only offer accounts to permanent residents of the United States, over 18 years of age, with a US Social Security number, so no use to anyone in UK