Competitor update

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.

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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.

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Interview with one of the co-founders of Atom -

Which explains how different their business model is from Monzo’s for the latecomers, like me. It’s 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 £135m of capital
  • About 250 full time staff

Loot’s 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 ‘new age’ banking stack rather than a legacy one - however I’d assume there will be quite a few ‘new’ 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!)

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Here’s 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.

I’m guessing that there’s 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 doesn’t seem to be a particularly good thing. Following your point, they appear to be the best processor for startups.
But we’ve seen the issues that Monzo’s 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.

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Ah I had thought from Loot’s 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 ‘bank marketplace’ 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):

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This is what I’d really love to see from Monzo. We have (soon to be had) a Tesco Bank joint account for our ‘spending money’ and would love to use Monzo but at the moment we’re using two separate cards and playing ‘whose turn is it to pay’ based on whichever Monzo card has the most dosh left on it!

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This is on the roadmap, though it’s probably a long way off because it’s not on the open roadmap -

Tom’s 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 too…

Oh yeah, I can definitely appreciate that it’s on the roadmap, but with it being a Tesco Bank account, you can see my more immediate need to get rid of this ASAP!

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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

simple bank write up - 33000 customers in Feb 2014, now inferring by interpolation they have almost 3 million customers -…hmmmmm

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and

featured here:

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Well I’m bit concerned for this guy :wink:

Gualandri is a serial entrepreneur who made a fortune setting up a digital bank in his native Italy. He has self-funded Soldo and believes it will stand out because of its focus on parents, rather than chasing the millennial market like most other startups.

We do only one thing and what we do I don’t think there are many, or possibly even any, who do it,”

The business might do well for now but if Monzo builds his solution

https://community.monzo.com/t/mondo-card-for-under-18s/1689/6

then why wouldn’t you choose their service & miss out on all of the extra features that come with Monzo?

UAccount looks cool (they’ve got a way around the FCFS protection challenge) but then you see that they want to make their revenue from fees :grimacing:

Lastly

Monzo CEO Tom Blomfield tells me his startup bank loses on average £40 per year per user at the moment.

&

Blomfield says losses on customers will be cut by about £20 a year when it launches its own current accounts early next year.

that’s awesome, I’m assuming that that’s not accounting for overheads but those figure’s are really useful for explaining how Monzo can become profitable by providing overdrafts with low interest rates.

Blomfield adds that £40 loss per user per year compares favourably to banks, which will regularly pay over £100 in marketing and offers to acquire a single customer.

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the difference being any Monzo card for under 18s will let them manage it themself say 15 and 16 year olds. Soldo’s offering is different in parents manage kids cards, think 9 or 10 year olds

Well we don’t know that younger children won’t be allowed to use the cards yet - if Monzo even creates this solution.

my point was even it both companies allow cards for 8 year olds their specific model is that their mum or dad administer it for them but at no point (correct me if I am wrong) has Monzo said that for any card they may introduce for minors, giving the impression those kids will have control of their own account

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I was just pointing out that Monzo haven’t got into the specifics of what a solution might look like at all so far. Tom is talking about accounts for under 18’s in his quote so I see your point. But based on what’s been said so far, I don’t think we should assume that Monzo wouldn’t issue cards to children either.