Competitor update

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 ÂŁ40 per year per user at the moment.

&

Blomfield says losses on customers will be cut by about ÂŁ20 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 ÂŁ40 loss per user per year compares favourably to banks, which will regularly pay over ÂŁ100 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.

Another white label banking platform, Finext. Looks like they started out in 2013 as solely financial data aggregation provider, but in May 2015 launched their banking platform.

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Some more news yesterday about the demise of high bank branches -

http://www.bankingtech.com/640572/more-branches-and-jobs-to-go-at-lloyds-banking-group

Lloyds was bailed out in 2008 and has been on a restructuring path since. It has separated and sold its domestic retail business, TSB (now owned by Spanish banking group Sabadell) and is looking to shed 12,000 jobs and close 400 branches by the end of 2017.

The bank says that the branch use across its brands (Lloyds, HBOS and Bank of Scotland) has been falling 15% year on year

Slightly surprised to see that Citibank have launched an API hub, although the abstract descriptions don’t exactly make it sound exciting & the key features are available in Australia & Singapore only -

https://developer.citi.com/

I have worked with other US financial institutions that use Australia as a test market - that could be the case here

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interesting talk from Brett King of Moven on the possibility of Fin tech banks being bought out by bigger banks and how far behind USA is in bank tech - very similar to Monzo set up - unfortunately 1 min advert at the start of vid.

http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000567936

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Marketing for a mobile only bank centered around cash withdrawals :thinking:

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More of a partnership than a competitor but interesting to see this from mastercard:

Given Monzo intends to be a mastercard debit card presumably they could use these services eventually without having to develop themselves

I saw an email from Zopa today, they are applying for a banking Licence to become a bank

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That’ll probably mean Monzo’s potential for partnership is out of the window then. Otherwise it’d be a conflict of interest for Zopa.

Monese which had originally proposed a 50p charge per cash deposit when they had free banking is now charging 2.5% for cash deposits despite introducing a monthly fee

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Are Monese cash deposits exclusively through PayPoint outlets?

Yes, they are only thru PayPoint

Here’s the announcement from Zopa -

Launching a bank, to sit alongside our existing peer-to-peer business, should allow us to create new and innovative savings and borrowing products. At launch, Zopa will offer FSCS protected deposit accounts to savers and overdraft alternatives to borrowers.

The regulatory application process should take about 15-24 months

Although not a competitor, has anyone here tried Scalable Capital.