Greetings,
One of the many things that I find pretty unique at Monzo is how I need not to worry about placing a travel notification on my account as the app knows when I’m in a different country, let’s me know the estimated exchange rate and that I wouldn’t be charged for using my card while abroad. I spoke to a Customer Associate, Francesco, and he confirmed that this also applies to online transactions made with the card. While it is a nice feature to have, will Monzo allow this to transfer over to current accounts once the transition to full Bank is completed?
This would be a game changer and a feature that would define Monzo as a Bank of the 21st Century, a time where the ease of travel is evermore present and less banks offer a foreign transaction fee-free account to its banking members.
As far as I’m aware monzo doesn’t plan to have any fees on their accounts other than a small overdraft.
It would be really great to see this with the rise of fees from other banks.
This is my understanding too. When I’ve discussed this with Jonas (Monzo CTO) he said that Monzo doesn’t want to charge fees because “it’s very hard for banks to compete with free”. In other words, if Monzo did charge fees then the banks would be able to undercut Monzo by charging a lower fee.
Since Monzo has a much lower overheads (no branches or legacy infrastructure to maintain), it can afford not to charge fees & as Josh mentioned, it will make it’s revenue by offering overdrafts (obviously users will be able to choose whether or not request an overdraft). Tom has said that Monzo should break even next year, after the overdraft product is launched.
I must say that this is a big selling point for me too. No hidden charges when spending abroad would be great. Fingers crossed it follows onto the current account. I guess we’ll soon see, but it looks very hopeful.
The lack of foreign transaction fees is an enormous plus for me too. Probably the most important selling point for me in fact.
I’m currently in process of setting up a business which uses service providers mostly based in the USA and only charge in USD. I’m looking into Tide if they also wave foreign transaction fees, I haven’t opened an account with them yet. Until I do (possibly after depending on if they charge fees) I’m putting all those transactions on Monzo and marking them as expenses.
In this day and age, I would hope that free foreign spending would be here already. It’s only the greedy legacy banks that wish to charge you 3% to spend your own money. Monzo is different, so let’s hope they separate themselves from the other banks by offering something useful and unique. I think they will.
