You’re going to need a bigger card reader
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Unfortunately not everyone can be fortunate enough to get a credit card.
Whether it be bad credit or they dont trust themselves
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True. Though I also wouldn’t leave it to the very last moment to transfer money for a vital service like petrol or food.
Obviously this isn’t the majority of people but these stories where people are left starving with no money when a bank goes down for a little while make me seriously wonder how they manage their financial situation. Money or no money it shouldn’t be that skin of the teeth situation.
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I work in retail and have seen a lot of people recently transferring money whenever they find out how much their purchases are. I only take it to be from a savings account to current account, I don’t really understand it but does happen.
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I budget around £65 a week and sometimes I get caught at the til and have to move some from my Space 
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These people are the reason I use self checkout all the time. Having to stand waiting rolling your eyes whilst they transfer funds or whoops I tried using the wrong card, or my phone is playing up 
Plus I don’t want isn’t the weather great today, oh that’s a new product I’ve not seen that before, I don’t care just whizz me items through and shut up
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Or… ‘oh sorry I forgot the crumpets. Just keep that all here, I’ll be right back’ 
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Takes all but 10 seconds 
Some of us need to stick to tight budgets
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I can feel my trolly rage activating you’ll be getting rammed all by accident if course. Oh whoops sorry I slipped
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Seems a lot longer when I’m on other side of till lol
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I agree with some it takes an age, either not very quick on the phone or with a bank that takes time to do anything.
Starling is pretty quick for this, card never declines and I usually do it just as it’s paying time.
I could just use Flex but causes more admin time as you can’t pay off a Flex transaction in a quick fashion.
Gotta choose a plan, then do all those taps, then go back into it and pay off extra with all those taps, along with moving the funds in the first place 
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Could just have a groceries only card 
once it’s spent up, no transferring allowed. You turn to licking moss off rocks.
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Well I do live by the seaside. I’ll be poaching gulls for supper.
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There is a lot of banks flowing with “we use the interchange fee to do X” where X, so far, has been:
- Offset carbon
- Plant trees
- Fund science
- Fund startups
- Invest in startups that the bank invests in so the bank can get richer
- All in on crypto baaabbyyyy
- Cashback
I will leave this meme here as one of the only ways early fintechs make money:
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I think they were comparing their setup to ours, but they do more sustainable stuff
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Ha, I was just pointing out the trend of “we can use the interchange fee to do something”
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Ah, may take a peek though can’t imagine it’s anywhere near as good 
Edit:
I’ll likely be corrected but it’s basically saying you spend as you would usually, and then pay to plant/invest in the carbon offset of those purchases afterwards for greater good.
The article is ok.
the stubbornly high customer acquisition costs coupled with marginally profitable operations that plagued Egg represent inescapable hurdles for the latest iteration of money-losing neobanks.
As market conditions deteriorate and neobanks’ cost of capital rises, the gap with incumbent banks may grow wider.
The number of net new current accounts peaked in the second half of 2019 at over 20,000 per quarter and has been falling since – in the final three months of 2021, it picked up just 3,000.
Really this is the core of it. Worrying to see new user numbers topping out. They’re not wrong about market conditions worsening, and the cost of capital going up. Up a lot, in fact. Even Andrew Bailey has “run out of horsemen”
Famously, Tom said that they didn’t want Monzo to be a “balance-sheet heavy bank”. The thing is that “balance-sheet heavy” is another way of saying “makes a lot of loans”, and unfortunately making a lot of loans is the core activity of a bank, by definition. So much so that when a company operating as a “Narrow Bank” (i.e. takes deposits, passes on the Fed’s interest rate with a small spread) tried to get reserve accounts at the Fed, they were told in no uncertain terms that it was never going to happen. The problem is that banks are in the business of maturity transformation; that really is their societal purpose. To pretend to you that your assets are safe but in reality do risky things with them. And so in reality that’s what Monzo has to do more of. And not this small-fry pretty-dicey BNPL stuff. Monzo needs to start issuing mortgages and making money that way.
Of course, the idea still seems to be to outsource this all; to pass the buck to non-bank institutions like Paragon, and take a referral fee instead, augmented by the interchange. The problem with that model is that you’re really just an intermediary, and what with CASS all it takes is for a competitor to come along with a better app (not hard, to be honest, Monzo’s app needs a wholescale redesign as even I can’t navigate it) and, poof, your users go bye-bye. So that’s my 10 cents. Monzo should issue mortgages themselves, and redesign the app.
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Quite a lot of that article doesn’t relate to Monzo really. Cost of acquisition is tiny in reality, especially compared to other banks and Varo who the article mentions.
And this is almost certainly the net customers gained from CASS switches each quarter. Yes, you’d like to see them going up, but at least they’re not going down - which I think is actually a bigger win that it sounds given there’s no monetary incentive to move to Monzo as other banks offer. Increased accounts are still running at about 100k a month per an article TS was interviewed for a few months back, and Monzo have spoken in the past about the ‘journey’ customers go on with Monzo - i.e. they might download the app to use for holiday, and then like it, and then gradually shift more and more of their banking there until it’s their core account.
Your cost of capital points are really valid - will be interesting to see what Monzo do. They could raise debt rather than issuing equity, given they’re in a pretty good spot now and must be pushing towards profitability.
But personally I wouldn’t be surprised if within a year the NASDAQ is back at all-time-highs and Monzo are able to easily raise another big chunk of change at an improved valuation. I guess the question is when they would want/need more money, on the back of their raise late last year, and could they hold out for more favourable conditions.
Suspect given the burn they felt in the COVID down round, they might like to just get more money in the door rather than quibble about valuations, to mitigate any risk of economic catastrophe.