You know I jumped on this and now wondering if I should have
I really don’t know what happened with Revolut, they had such a good thing going but then never fixed issues, went weirdly icky with marketing, and ran off trying to do current accounts. 
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I had 2 major issues with their premium:
- Insurance seems like good deal, but single trip cannot be longer than 20 days, so wouldn’t work for me.
- Their careful wording doesn’t actually mean that you’ll be investor, they used very careful phrasing in T&C. While I think they might genuinely offer chance to invest for everyone in 5,000 premium users, it’s not clearly stated.
From Revolut’s T&C:
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I have never seen an investment opportunity without any valuation mentioned, just a line graph showing how many users they have and how hard they are burning the free forex facility. Are they serious or is it going to hit 5k on April Fools day? 
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very clever!!!
trying to avoid getting themselves into a pickle by getting themselves into a pickle
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Looks like Starling are starting to take comms seriously, however i still think they have fubar’d the beta, as it looks like you have to re-register to enter the beta.
Not really fair on those that registered 15mths ago, who now seem to be at the bottom of the queue.
I just got that email too.
I also had a look for their API, looks like you can already initiate payments from it. Although I can’t find any actual details.
To be fair to them though, Monzo doesn’t have up to date API docs published either.
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They have probably been on here reading the comments about them and thought they better send and update out,
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I reckon as monzo have been so open, they should ask for beta testers of the other banks to come in and discuss pros and cons etc, get everyone in the same playing field
Barclays finally offers to show pending transaction. Not like this will make me stay with them after the current account at Monzo launched.
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Cleo just reached their millionth query…I don’t have anything to benchmark that against though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://twitter.com/meet_cleo/status/848897604125691904
According to the blog, they aren’t ready to start telling users whether they’re overpaying for bills, yet. Also
Cleo, our smart little money assistant, has reached 99% accuracy.
& from the Medium story that the blog links to
Cleo can now answer questions with 99% accuracy, meaning she has an answer for everything
Although they don’t say how accurate the answers are…still -
Cleo can now answer over 4,000 questions which includes 14,000 lines of copy, 3,000 emojis and 1,000 gifs!
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No sign of Tandem on social media for 10 days now. Wonder if House of Fraser have turned the electricity off? 
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Feels like Starling have done the same, dropped off from actually posting anything useful, to just the same old interviews with the Senior Team, although they did send the pointless email about which device you use…
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…the calm before the storm…
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I came across and interesting article in the CityAM, The Alt-Fi Endgame An interesting take on the endgame of FinTech. monzo gets a couple mentions too.
Thoughts?
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Interesting. Also interesting his example, uber just pulled the plug on kicking drivers by withdrawing their autonomous cars didn’t they. Haha . Realise it’s only temporary
No doubt in the future we’ll see mergers, buy outs from the big banks, and some exiting the market all together.
Take Atom for example. BBVA is a major investor with a 29%. So presumably a full take over, or an IPO will be their exit strategy.
I think Tide is an interesting one. An e-payments provider offering business accounts. Current rates are 20p per transaction and £1 per ATM withdrawal. I wonder how sustainable that is considering the costs they face in opening and maintaining the accounts. Revolut has over 500,000 users, and has made over 21m transactions.
Aiming itself at small businesses I don’t see Tide reaching that number of users (considering there are only 5.4m SMEs in the UK), but even if they did capture 9% of the market that’s only £4.2m in revenue. Probably less since card transactions don’t carry a fee, and most businesses don’t make ATM withdrawals if they can help it. It will be interesting to see what they do in the future.
Speaking of Revolut, they were founded two years ago, and have hit half a million users, which is impressive. They have since tightened up on how the card can be used fee free* (will travellers stick with it?), and recently introduced a premium membership which should bring in additional income. I noticed they are now promoting using it as a ‘bank’ account too. I wonder if a banking licence is something they might pursue in the future? If so is the market large enough for Monzo, Atom, Starling, Revolut, and Tandem? Especially considering that the larger banks will start to fight back at some stage (though this might a while given they are locked into antiquated systems).
*I’m aware there’s a slight markup on weekends, but that’s similar with a lot of these type of cards
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Great post, but I no longer think Tandem are in the equation. Having rececently ditched their account and now concentrating on launching a credit card there will be one less competitor in the current account / debit card market
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So what other companies charge more at weekends? I am not aware of any.
As for the 20p charge, Fire also charge a 20p fee.
While you did not mention Monese in your post. I think they will rank alongside other e-money solutions, even if they not a full bank like Monzo
wow since when did this happen?!