Australian banks (Commonwealth in particular) now offer all of Monzo’s features plus more- most have brought them in over the last year or two so I don’t think it would take much for the large UK banks to catch up…
I think it’s more a case of UK banks being behind the curve, and Monzo benefiting from that.
Hopefully it is a bit more nuanced than that! 
+1
12 years (developer, engineer, architect) working in the large banking institutions and I fully agree with @ismet
If we look a little further afield, I can envisage the CC companies competing on some of this though. Amex have a very good mobile proposition (i don’t work for them) which seems to be improving all the time.
Shame they have a card that’s barely useful in day-to-day shopping 
That myth has been peddled for years, now. A few places don’t take AMEX. It’s not as bad as people like to make out.
I had one a while back but gave up on it as the coverage just wasn’t there. (Technically I have one now but that’s corporate rather than personal.)
People constantly bang on about AMEX being expensive for retailers and no good for customers as most retailers do not accept it.
It’s largely nonsense.
It required a separate form and a separate agreement to accept AMEX as well as MasterCard and Visa, but the fees were similar, when I had a business that took card payments.
Off the top of my head, I can only think of one place I go that doesn’t accept AMEX and that’s my local(ish) Volvo dealer. For that I use MasterCard.
Here are some reasons why I don’t accept AMEX (any more) in my pubs:
It’s a separate merchant agreement. Payments from AMEX come through separately from payments for all other cards. This means I have to count AMEX separately in the point of sale system and my accounts, and train all my staff that AMEX payments must be handled differently. If they mess up (which they will, because it’s a manual procedure that needs to be done right every time even when we’re really busy) then I have problems at reconciliation time.
AMEX deduct merchant fees from the amounts they pay each day, rather than paying in full and then invoicing monthly. It’s more faff to deal with in the accounts.
AMEX is between 2x and 3x more expensive than accepting other cards — last time I looked, AMEX was about 3% and other cards (where based on a percentage rather than a flat fee per transaction) are about 1.2%.
Everyone who has an AMEX card has another card anyway.
All fair points. I think the fees are determined by a number of criteria. Our Amex fee was lower than that with Visa and MasterCard being higher.
All valid points, though.
Aren’t most of these also problems with whoever your system is with? iZettle takes Amex on exactly the same structure as a Mastercard. I think Square does too.
To an extent, yes. We’re using traditional PDQ terminals with a merchant account from Barclaycard Merchant Services at the moment. iZettle and Square would both be much more expensive for us overall, based on their published fee structures. (We take about £1.5 million per year through our card terminals, which makes us a bit too large for some merchant service providers and a bit too small for others!)
I’m actively looking for other merchant service providers at the moment. In particular I’m looking for a provider that will support us (semi-)integrating the card terminals with our custom point of sale software. The only integration I’ve been offered by Barclaycard is with Verifone Ocius-based terminals, which appear to be quite pricey. They won’t even consider talking to us about integration with Ingenico terminals until we have >50 terminals overall (we currently have 10).
(Semi-integration: the POS software says to the terminal “I want to take £x.xx” and the terminal says back “yes” or “no”; no cardholder data is passed to the POS software so it remains outside the scope of PCI-DSS.)
After saying this, I thought I’d better go and look at the actual figures to see if my assertion was correct. It wasn’t. iZettle and Square fees are 1.75%. The best in that area at the moment appear to be SumUp at 1.69%. With BMS we’re paying about 1.49% on average. (It depends on the precise mix of cards we take each month: we pay a flat rate per transaction for debit cards and a percentage for credit cards.)
So we’re paying less than we would with iZettle, Square, etc. but not much less.
I think I need to find a new deal!