Competitor update

I disagree with this article.

Clients from high street banks probably don’t care or are too lazy to complain about the level of service to start with.
Secondly, clients that are now with “new challenger banks” have a higher standard when it comes to service (that’s why they moved from high street to these “new challenger banks” in the first place).

What about satisfaction of current clients from “new challenger banks” in comparison to their former high street banks?

Nonetheless, there will always be room for improvement when it comes to UX regardless of service, sector or company.

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Continuing the trend…

UK banks shut 1,000 branches as customers turn to mobile banking

More than 1,000 bank branches have closed in the UK during the past two years as pressure mounts on lenders to cut costs and as more customers turn to mobile banking.

HSBC has shut the most outlets of any bank since the start of 2015, reducing nearly 30 per cent of its network across the country by closing 321 branches, according to Which?, the consumer group.

The state-backed lenders Royal Bank of Scotlandand Lloyds Banking Groupshut 191 and 180 branches respectively. The regions with the most bank branch closures per 100,000 people were Wales, south-west England and Scotland.

Pressure is building on banks to cut costs at a time when profit margins are being squeezed by record-low interest rates. The main reason for closing branches to meet this goal, banks say, is the growth of mobile and online banking. HSBC, for example, has seen the number of branch visits drop by 40 per cent in the past five years.

Research published this year by the consultancy Caci showed that current account customers visited a bank branch 427m times in 2015 — less than half the 895m logins on a mobile app. The number of branch visits is forecast to drop to 268m by 2020, while mobile app usage is on track to more than double to 2.3bn.

& …

“banks should consider innovations such as cash delivery and pick-up services as an alternative.”

what a nightmare to have to deal with (& pure cost), poor banks :laughing:

Edit

Also -

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Hi Guys,

I know this is the competitor update thread, but is there an update on Monzo.

Maybe @tom could provide us with an update on timelines in relation to getting the full bank licence?

The only reason I ask is that I’m just eager to kick my existing bank to touch as soon as possible and being completely sold on Monzo means i’ll be treating it as my main bank as soon as the license is granted.

One other reason is that it seems to me the pace of innovation will really pick up when you get given the full license.

There’s always

My first point of call when I’d like to know what’s going on :slight_smile:

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Thanks. Checked that out already though. Was more referring to the nitty gritty of whats required to move from an a limited banking license to a full banking licence

Hi James, good question. We’ll perhaps publish a blog post setting out timelines in more detail, but the answer is broadly “the first half of 2017”.

We’re testing out the very first Monzo bank accounts internally right now; we’ve successfully made live Faster Payments, Bacs Direct Credits and Direct Debits, and foreign transfers, all with Monzo account numbers and sort-code. We’re also working to finalise our full MasterCard implementation.

We can’t hold more than £50k of customer deposits until our restrictions are lifted by the regulator, so we’ll have to stick with internal testing until that happens. Once our restrictions are lifted, we’ll start rolling out the first few hundred “full” banks accounts to early supporters. I’d hope this would be around March/April/May time. We need to figure out the fairest way of allocating these first accounts!

As long as we’re happy that everything’s working as expected, we’ll ramp up the numbers of these accounts, as we did with the prepaid card. We’re aiming to fully transition the prepaid programme to full bank accounts by about June/July 2017.

As with before, these dates are just my best guess. There are a number of reasons the dates could slip, but they’re what we’re working to right now.

Hope that helps!

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I’m curious @tom, @oliver (or anybody else?)! What are Monzo’s sort codes? Do we have a unique set or do we piggyback on another bank’s set of sort codes (like Metro Bank with Barclays’s 20 sort codes)?

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Because PR

https://ibsintelligence.com/ibs-journal/ibs-news/starling-bank-pilots-debit-card-delivery-by-drone/

Why would a bank bother working out how to do this, when normal couriers will be able to offer the service, as soon as the regulators approve using drones for delivery (whenever that is)?

Surely flying drones from the HQ would only make a marginal difference in delivery time vs having a courier collect the cards, at that point.

Much less secure too as they’re quite easy to shoot down (with decent aim) and they don’t post through your letterbox so anyone grab the delivery.

That being said, we’d hope they have some kind of card activation by app security measure in place. I’m not sure how they work.

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…because someone lost the plot

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Because PR is still a pretty good reason :smiley: Reminds me of when transferwise kept on getting naked in London

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Thanks NatWest - any ideas on an app? :thinking:

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Not that Tide are a competitor, as they only offer business accounts. Ive been told I’m officially allowed to spread the word. In their own words, Tide has “unwrapped their public beta in time for Christmas” - https://beta.tide.co

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There is a certain synergy between Monzo and Tide one does personal but not business and the other business but not personal, and they have the same major shareholder

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Just got. My Transparent Loot MasterCard today. & I have to say it’s so sexy!!!

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Update : You can only top up via BT, no Applepay no debit card, no Banking licence. Topped up ten pounds VIA FPSand will take two hours too arrive in Account . Apart from card these guys are no where near Mondo…

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Some interesting numbers / information on Monzo’s competitors in this podcast from 11FS, who also interviewed some of the Monzo team last week. -

From 5:40 onwards.

Reported funding of the challenger banks:

  • Starling received an additional £48m in January
  • Atom £135m total
  • Tandem £100m
  • Monzo £15m (I don’t think the host said £50m)

Platforms which the challenger banks are built on:

For anyone who’s interested, the remainder of the discussion about the challenger banks is mainly focused on whether these banks really are different, their business models & whether banks trying to influence user’s behavior is a good thing.

It’s discussion with some pretty influential, intelligent people from the fintech industry not getting challenger banks - although they obviously haven’t taken an in depth look at them either, to be fair…

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Loot’s card and packaging certainly look impressive. What is their USP and what are your thoughts on their app?

while I have not seen their app, I thought they were targetting students as their intended market

The apps superb. & you can send money to any other account. No problems thus far …