Headlines reported that Monzo is working on setting up an Irish office.
This would serve as a gateway to further European expansion, apart from the US that’s being worked on (on and off) for longer.
Did anyone read more on the European plans?
What do you think might make a good strategy?
Germany has N26, France doesn’t seem to generate a lot of press with native neobanks.
Denmark has Lunar (there were some rumours about a collaboration / merger with Monzo, but these turned out to be false).
Some countries like Belgium have access to N26 or Revolut, but it’s relatively rare to see it as main bank. (most offer no local IBAN’s, or didn’t integrate country-specific features which incumbent banks have)
To me, it always made more sense to expand from the UK to IE before US/DE/ES etc: same language (okay, Gaelic is used but the vast majority use English day to day), similar time zone (so support staff can be shared), similar bank systems (yes, domestic integration may vary a bit - but IBAN/BIC/Euro bank connections will be the same: US will be totally different: dependency on checks etc), similar postal addresses (but some variation of Eircodes/postcodes), similar regulatory restrictions.
Enough variation to help identify major pain points, but enough commonality that you aren’t nearly starting from scratch.
After Ireland, a larger country with one dominant language probably makes most sense.
For example: France (thanks for mentioning BoursoBank there, not sure how popular they are) or Germany (having N26).
N26 lost quite some trust with press coverage of freezing cards too quickly.
It happened to lots of neobanks, but seems to be more intense for them.
Netherlands is known to be open to innovation, but is a smaller country and already has Bunq.
Belgium could use Monzo, but has three official languages to cater for (Dutch and French being the most common).
