I live in a shared mail address and both my wife and I have had it affect credit rating. The issue with us is not that places are rating them more of a risk for credit but actually a data validation issue.
e.g. we live in flat B but some places will only list the address as ‘flat b-d’. Infact some financial institutions systems literally cannot cope with it being flat b - so on credit we show up varyingly at b-d, b, ‘flat b’ or 27b which is not great for a record look up
Had a horrendous experience with Santander - when I opened a joint account they noticed that the address structure was slightly different - they forced me to fill in a paper form and bring it into branch to say that I had moved address (even though I explicitly hadnt, it was just their system). They blocked my new account until I did it!
I had similar with different databases having my address as 108, First Floor 108, 108 Upper, 108a, 108 A, and had to do a change of address form for 3 companies despite not moving
Monese are expanding to Europe with EUR accounts with individual IBAN (their UK GBP accounts currently have a communal IBAN account) and Mastercard exchange rate…
Most people on these forums know monzo is building something gigantic and game changing, Revolut is muck on their shoes! I don’t think what Revolut have done is game changing. From being on a par with monzo last year (<100k users with everything free and a slick but basic app) their user numbers ballooned to 500k because they heavily pitched a forex loss leader to underbanked migrants and travellers who are used to getting slammed with fees and it went viral in those circles - I know some of those people who heard from other migrants that the forex is FREE on Revolut and everyone they know signed up to get their free card and get free forex (meanwhile monzo has kept the ‘freeness’ of its offering as something of a secret - its main selling point has been user experience and transparency. I tried to convince a couple of Revolut friends(migrants in love with Revolut) that monzo is free too but is building something much bigger and better in scope, getting a banking license, building full stack and aiming to be a financial control centre the size of google or Facebook, but they said meh all I need is free forex and my family and friends back home are on Revolut so why change to this one I’ve never heard of?
Once revolut hit that 500 or 600k of users looking for a free meal they have suddenly slammed the floodgates shut like a Venus flytrap and tried to implement monetisation very crudely, which has caused their service to go to pot (I have a card from when it was free and have followed) - just look at their community forum to see how bad it is over there. They have huge compliance issues so they just shut people’s accounts without any information, then they don’t have any support to deal with the fallout.
Those 5,6,7 hundred k users who joined for free forex suddenly have ridiculously low limits like £200 a month withdrawals before fees, and now you have to pay to even get a card - both of which are free from the worst incumbents. Very few of these users are going to be active considering they joined for freebies and now it is far from free, and then when monzo hit the ground with their transparency and zero fee offering, who is going to want to pay all these fees to get a thimble of fintech when it’s available on tap over in shoreditch?
Their partnerships are just quickly whipped together things to tick off a box, like seriously would you take out a mortgage via an Emoney app where the support don’t even respond to urgent issues? Revolut may have a niche of maybe a couple hundred thousand people across Europe who will pay a premium for what they are offering, but :mondo: is going to conquer the world!
That’s why I think £300m for Revolut is a joke valuation.
This might not be a fair comparison (I don’t know exactly how these ratings work) but maybe this gives us a rough sense of Monzo’s growth vs Starling’s right now…
This feature’s not a game changer but it’s a pretty cool idea - I’ve just received an email from Revolut to let me know that users can
Choose a phone contact, add the amount and then text or share a payment link. They add their bank details and that’s it – the money goes straight to their bank.
in other words, shifting the friction from the person sending money to the person who has the incentive to complete the bank details it works in 23 currencies.
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it works in 23 currencies.
