Monzo vs Starling vs Chase vs Others - 2022 Poll!

Lots of chat on here about Chase and its financials offers, and what that might mean for Monzling.

Only one thing to do… poll!


Which bank has the best app?
Not interest rates, not features, just best app. Think design, think responsiveness…

  • Chase
  • Monzo
  • Starling
  • Other

0 voters

Which bank has the best feature set?
Not the app, not interest rates, just features. Think cheque imaging, think pots, think budgeting…

  • Chase
  • Monzo
  • Starling
  • Other

0 voters

Which bank has the best rates?
Not the app, not features, just the best commercial offering. Think interest rates, think fees and charges…

  • Chase
  • Monzo
  • Starling
  • Other

0 voters

Which bank has the best customer service?
Not the app, not features, not rates, just excellent service. Think response time, helpfulness, ability to resolve issues first time…

  • Chase
  • Monzo
  • Starling
  • Other
  • Don’t know

0 voters

Finally, what you gonna do?

  • Switch to Chase from Starling
  • Switch to Chase from Monzo
  • Rinse Chase for their offers but not move
  • Do nothing
  • Do something else (explain below!)

0 voters

1 Like

Customer service:

Took Chase 45 mins to respond yesterday, information was sufficient bar the agent saying they do offer the switching service then sent me to a paper form. While she’s correct, I’d have hoped me initially saying CASS, she would say no they don’t accept.

Took Starling 17 hours to respond to 4 questions in the same message, very vague answers and didn’t really respond in full.

Took Monzo 1hr 30m to respond to my last proper interaction via chat, and gave a full descriptive response to my query.

Not bias by any means :sweat_smile: think just pot luck.

As for the do something else, Starling is looking to be our joint account so there’s potential I’ll move a lot there.

5 Likes

Incidentally, if anyone wants to run these poll elsewhere, do feel free. There’s an understandable Monzo bias here!

8 Likes

For CS I’ve had both sides of it with Monzo but without Chase or Starling accounts, hard to balance. Voted Chase purely based on hearsay on here really

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Closest option maybe “rinse Chase for their offers but not move” but that isn’t accurate for me because for all intents and purposes I’ve essentially moved over all my spending to Chase, rounds ups and cash cash savings (ex premium bonds). The only function Monzo serves for me since September 2021 is servicing the small amount of direct debits I have that I can’t be bothered/don’t see a need to move. Also my salary still goes into my legacy bank account. Monzo is the hub I guess as I send salary from legacy to Monzo then above monies to Chase. If Monzo removed that annoying trends upgrade thing blocking the graph in summary I’d maybe use summary more but other than this Monzo is dormant.

7 Likes

I’m finding that I’m using Chase for spending (for cashback and roundups), and savings, and Monzo for everything else. I’ve taken to sending from Monzo to Chase the exact amount of each transaction so I can keep Trends up to date.

My preferred outcome would, I think, be for Chase to have open banking and to continue to use Monzo as my hub. I actually think Monzo has an opportunity to do what Money Dashboard, Emma and Lumio haven’t quite cracked, whilst leaving me the flexibility to move spending etc to whichever dumb pipe is currently the most economically advantageous.

3 Likes

likewise i dont have a starling account and have no desire to have a chase account what so ever so my vote for customer service was based purely on monzo thankfully ive never had the long wait times others seem to experience

That sounds like an admin nightmare; what’s the average frequency with which you do this would you say?

Personally, I just send the once lump sum a month over and that acts as my budget.

Agree but don’t we have to be Plus customers to even benefit from Monzo’s open banking connection feature. Personally, not enough value add for me to pay for banking, and I’m not quite sure what it would take.

Open Banking can’t come soon enough and it’s bound to come first with an integration between Chase and Nutmeg. That’s a pretty good combo given I’m technically still a Nutmeg customer (inactive as of new tax year today as just opened a new LISA with Dodl by AJ Bell).

4 Likes

Great poll.

Since I can’t rejoin chase yet Monzo tops it, and actually would’ve anyway. The only thing I’m less fussed about is plus and premium.

The former is underdeveloped (I.e hasn’t really changed and still feels “padded out” to justify the cost) and the latter would only be useful if the phone insurance covered family phones too.

Let’s see what the next 12 months brings

2 Likes

Truth

2 Likes

This is true. But I’m still worried about velocity. They can’t stand still, they really can’t.

4 Likes

I’m on a Premium which just about works out for me.

But if it didn’t, I think I’d still consider paying for Plus. At the moment, it just works better than Emma or other aggregators for me.

If they add in more functionality to Trends, bring in advanced goals (I want to set a goal for my Chase Savings, add it as a manual account and have Monzo calculate and set up a regular standing order to meet my goal), and rethink budgeting and forward planning (roll in committed spend with Das Budget’s concept of expenses) and then Monzo would really be more about the hub than the current account for me. And I’d pay for the privilege.

(Other wishlist items remain rules based transfers, and integration with wealth management, share trading and asset tracking).

2 Likes

I have Monzo for wages and dds and subscriptions. I also have plus is great for virtual cards and open banking. I use Chase now for savings and spending.

3 Likes

I think plus is great for what i use it for the virtual cards are good for netflix etc and now that you can pay from pots with them even better , monzo is my only bank and unless some thing uterly fantastic comes out to beat it i dont see me finding the urge to leave , found out in the space of 3 short months that the bricks and morter banks just dont have what i needed

2 Likes

The Chase app is pretty nice but feels like an earlier version of the Monzo app. It’ll need to keep changing to accommodate feature growth unless they have some grander strategy as yet unheard of. For support, Chase has been fantastic and near instant to respond to any of the random questions I’ve had for them so far. 100% the best experience I’ve had with a bank since Monzo in the Beta days.

Monzo (imo), has the best app design & feature set if you pay for Plus. At that point you get one of the best feature sets on the market, but the design has a bit of a wibble as it tries to find places for the features.

For hard & fast banking however, Santander still feels like a more robust choice for me with most of the bases covered in their app. First direct has an almost identical app to theirs with the addition of Cheque Imaging. As someone who deals with cheques often - that’s a winning feature alone and one I’m really disappointed that we haven’t seen materialse more widely. Posting cheques is a faff and if I’m going into town I’d rather just pay it in at an ATM.

Starling for me was just a dud sadly, I found no reason to use the account and no benefit to having it. Closed it when Chase came along and only remember it exists when people mention it here now. Their customer service was nonexistent, features were limited and app was dreary to use.

I’d rank Monzo top for overall but it’s still missing imporant things on the people and feature sides that’d place it above all else. I think they can do it, they just need to… y’know… do it. :slight_smile:

6 Likes

If Chase offer open banking I’ll probably make the switch. Only reason I’m still using Monzo is because I can see all my accounts in it (and I’m paying for that ‘privilege’…) I’m presuming they’ll also integrate Nutmeg at some point, so that’ll be another account in one app.

I do all my day-to-day spending on credit cards, so the cashback Chase are offering is nice, but eh.

4 Likes

Considering you’re very pro-check-out-FAQs-before-you-use-a-human this surprises me. It’s known on here and on the Chase website that they don’t currently offer CASS :thinking:

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I’m aware of CASS but I asked when they would be looking to join, out of curiousity.

1 Like

According to Chase Twitter Support they’re working on Open Banking, along with Joint accounts and CASS.

Nicolle at Chase Support sure is promising a lot! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Hmmm… I was told in chat on the 29th:

We currently don’t have any plans to sign up to open banking, but it is something in the near future. Please keep your push notifications on in the app to be notified of new products and services when they are launched. Is there anything else I can assist you with today?