Well to summarise, people in big banks spend most of their time sorting their papers out than actually improving their products and services. “Having meetings for the sake of having meetings”.
To me it seems like Monzo definitely has a competitive advantage because they built their entire platform in-house and have those people working for them. You can buy a “bank in a box” but you don’t get the engineers nor the mindset that comes with it.
The brand advantage Monzo has is kinda unique and unfortunately for everyone else I don’t think they’ll ever be able to have something similar. When Monzo launched there was no alternative to the big banks, so Monzo is seen as kind of a saviour. Once Monzo sets the bar for what banking should be and everyone follows suit, you will no longer get that feeling with any other bank (no matter how fancy it is) because you’re already used to Monzo and the way Monzo does things became the new standard.
And I totally agree about Starling - I’ve got their account, it works just fine but it doesn’t feel the same. I’m not sure why it’s like that - maybe if Starling came first I would see it differently. Their community does feel a little colder IMO, and overall it looks too much like a legacy bank even with their in-house tech stack (which I’m sure is brilliant).
Lol with the lag behind of development on Android, Halifax would probably be able to catch up at this rate. I get the point you’re making, but the big banks also have big pockets, so can push a lot more to the App and gain plenty of traction whilst they fix their back end. You guys are developing the backend at the sacrifice of the Android App side.
I can’t see the argument that Starling and Monzo should be similar, in the fairness of competition there should be a difference and you should be able to chose between those differences. Interestingly I like different parts of both.
Here’s another excellent blog from one of the Monzo co-founders Jason Bates on exactly this subject. He points out that although it looks like the challenger banks are just a cosmetic improvement, they represent a much greater change & one that the legacy banks will struggle to replicate, the key point is that
While they might look vaguely similar now, the differences run deep. As it’s a fundamental shift from products to services.
& also -
The legacy banks have a large cost base to support, which makes adopting the challenger’s marketplace model difficult
[The challengers] " have only just put the building blocks in place for the intelligent contextual services that we are only just beginning to see. There isn’t a traditional banking product platform at the heart of a digital bank. It’s a real time intelligent services hub."
I’d also recommend checking out the slightly tense podcast that Jason refers to where he discussed this with the CEO of Curve Shachar Bialick.
For me the question is not “how easy” can they replicate it, it’s “can they be bothered at all”?
Apps have been around for a long long time, and the classic banks have amongst the worst possible apps available. Even new apps from the likes of Tesco Bank show ‘classic’ thinking, by making me jump through hoop after hoop in the name of ‘security’. Once in, it’s just an ALL CAPS version of my a transation list. Useless.
Banks might hire some smart people, but they’re just blind to the total concept of doing things differently to how it’s been done for a century. I’ve had a current account from Natwest for over twenty years, in that time, no new features have been added. The last update to their iOS app was that it says ‘Good Evening Sam’ on startup, big woop! Each month NatWest send me an email to tell me than in 3 days I can download a PDF of my statement, what are they doing that it takes 3 days to generate a PDF?!
Classic banks just don’t rethink they current practice, and don’t show any desire to either. So they would never make a monzo style app with more features.
Wow - that link says Mark Mullen of atom is the challenger bank representative for Open Banking. What a crock.
Atom recently decided not to launch a current account as they had planned (for years) because it will be difficult with things up in the air with open banking. Great open banking role model there.
there’s more discussion on that here 
