From what I understand Ireland isn’t as heavy a credit country as the UK which is why they don’t rely so heavily on credit products.
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Maybe it’s down to the smaller population, I’m not sure.
No, it’s very much not mainly cash based. Most people use cards / mobile wallets, same as the UK.
I wouldn’t say charging citizens for everything is accurate either. I’ve lived both in the UK and Ireland, and at least from my personal experience, I’m on the whole financially much better off here. Average salaries (engineering sector) are higher than the UK. While we might pay for banking, we don’t pay Council tax for example. We do have Property Tax, my Property Tax here is a tiny fraction of Council Tax. We don’t pay for water either, that’s state provided.
So swings and roundabouts really…
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Ireland don’t even have credit scores like in the UK they have a Central Credit Register run by their Central Bank and a company called Experian. Thats only for loans over €500 and on top of that lenders then assess risk themselves with their own policies and private bureaus, but no score is calculated like here. So that’s credit score services like we have out.
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Ahh yes. The UK ranks quite low compared to our neighbours when it comes to saving habits. Interesting how only 3.28% difference to Ireland turns out to be quite significant in reality.
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Great image, based of this image alone Greece would be a great market for Monzo and any potential Monzo credit products 
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You can. Limited availability, but I’ve seen it on Santander ATMs and a few others. Not sure about in Ireland though.
I’m quite surprised how low down Poland is. Thought they’d be somewhere near Germany.
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On the continent of Europe ATMs now support contactless withdrawals it’s not impossible just more uncommon in the UK
Yeah same with Spain and Portugal I would have expected them to be higher, also surprising how much our Irish counterparts have
Yes, I know that ATMs are starting to have contactless readers installed on them.
But I was under the impression that if you used a wallet like Google / Apple Pay on them, the linked underlying card had to be a physical one that had previously been verified by a PIN number for security / AML reasons, and not a Virtual Card which could be immediately issued, loaded to a wallet and used at an ATM.
I’m sure I read that somewhere, but I could also be completely wrong about that too…
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Just googled it, and funnily enough the article that came up first was a Revolut help page stating the card can’t be a virtual one:
I guess the other obvious thing is that a Virtual card doesn’t have a PIN number.
Although you could argue that device security and biometrics performs the same function.
It would be good if you could use a virtual card, I’d never order a physical one again
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Make sense to not allow virtual cards to be able to withdraw from ATMs only physical cards that have been properly activated and chip and pin has been used at least once
Your face/fingerprint validates the card therefore doesn’t really make a difference.
Works the same way a pin does, hence we have digital wallets.
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Back to Monzo - here’s a differentiator for Ireland:
Speak to a real-life human 24/7 if something urgent comes up. We’re available through in-app chat when you need us.
I hope this is local, in house, support - and avoids the many (many) pitfalls of the UK provision. 
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This is definitely the game changer and something no competitor offers to everyone
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South Africa outsourced in no time.
Ultimately I think with a market like Ireland it will all come down to packaging and the way it’s all tied together. Overall I think the likes of Monzo and Revolut will likely have a lot of overlapping features, the main differentiator will be the way they package it all together for the consumer.
Monzo’s packaging will suit some, Revoluts will suit others but ultimately both will exist. A lot of the UK differentiators like the free Greg’s, Railcard, Car Breakdown and Credit Score just won’t exist in Ireland because of the difference in market and the way they do things over there.
Again my final verdict to the cherry on top will be packaging imo.
As the expand into Europe that’s where things will get juicy because mainland Europe do things different to Ireland again so some of the UK similar things may come into play in other parts of Europe.
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I think they are backwards because… they just are like that. There is a lot fo backwardness in NI too, although the rest of the UK has managed to drag them along in the 21st century in many respects so it’s not so bad.
The “we’ve always done it this way” attitude is king here.
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I’ve banked with nearly every player in the Irish maket. You can do it for free in Ireland, albeit your choices are limited to EBS, N26 & Revolut.
EBS’ online offering is poor, N26’s is good albeit they had no joint a/c product when they launched and all a/c come with a DE IBAN (in theory not a problem but you do come across the odd issue), and Revolut which people primarily use for FX, bill splitting and the like. It’s UI is confusing & there’s a lot of up selling which is off-putting & undermines their credibility.
Why are charges higher here? Competition.
Fee free was the norm pre-GFC. We had far more then and have been (unfairly) neglected in its aftermath.
Monzo have an opportunity to do well, establish themselves as a trustworthy virtual bank, fee-free, simple UI, joint accounts & human being to talk (invest in training for the differences between UK & IE).
Bring on the competition!
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Just be aware that in the UK the Ombudsman issued a report saying Monzo wrongly denied refunds to customers who were victims of scams and fraud. The report claims that 34% of customer fraud claims were wrongly rejected by Monzo. We know Revolut are poor in this area as well so I hope Monzo will up their game on this. The story was in the Guardian yesterday.