N26 leaves the UK

Why are N26 not withdrawing from the USA? They cannot use their German banking licence there. Its because they are doing well in that market. Brexit is the easy excuse when it is clear they are not doing well in the UK. Other European banks are clear on this.

Ali Niknam, the chief executive of Dutch bank bunq, stated “Based on the current rules and regulations, we see no (regulatory) reason to leave the UK.”

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Those of us who eagerly anticipated the arrival of N26 will recall just how disappointing the reality proved to be. The absolute lack of progress upon launch to deliver any features (other than the much vaunted “clean minimalist white screen) was a real head-scratcher.

Any subsequent features (DDs, payee management etc) arrived with no real comms strategy behind them. Rightly or wrongly, N26 gave every impression of not being up to compete with Monzo and Starling for the mobile market.

And despite all this, the fintech community was urging them on to be a real alternative - ‘twas not to be.

They will at least be remembered for their funky see-through card :slightly_smiling_face:.

Edit: Just took a look at this. Must admit I hadn’t been aware of the controversy in the lead-up to the UK launch.

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I don’t understand this denial by some people that Brexit wasn’t not a factor. The smoke screen argument fails because they’re expanding into other markets. The low grade product may have been true at the outset but N26 offers everything now and it’s got a very polished user interface, better than many other banks and on par with starling etc.
The transition period stuff doesn’t hold water when you’ve got a government constantly saying we want to be out within a year.

Companies like certainty and clear direction, something that hasn’t been the case for some time. Nobody will no how Brexit will actually turn out but it will mean some barriers to trade where previously there were none.

If Brexit wasn’t happening then they could continue without the need to setup as a UK based company, plus get a UK HQ, plus get a UK bank licensing etc. Even with a transition period they would still have ultimately had to do that and clearly they felt money wise that wasn’t a good move. So Brexit was a factor.

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But didn’t you say you only used one space so surely this doesn’t matter?

The trouble with budgeting is that people handle and represent their money differently. Personally Summary works perfectly except for the inconsistent way it handles payments received.

You ignored my point. In business, as in life, there is not always a simple binary “doing well” vs “not doing well”. The UK market may have been an easy one for N26 to stick with for several years if the regulatory burden was going to be low (and so the challenge was basically tech and marketing), but since the regulatory burden is becoming higher it’s not.

If every city in the UK had its own financial services regulation, would it be profitable for every bank to provide its services in every city? No. And this is the same argument.

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This argument would be easier to countenance were it not for the fact that they launched in the UK long after the Brexit vote. It doesn’t make sense to then suggest that they’ve been blindsided now by potential regulatory burden when they would’ve had a plan for it from the start.

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Honestly, I’d be surprised if they’re making any gains here. They don’t have check deposit or checkbooks (still a thing here in the States and something of a pain point on the Monzo US beta at the moment), they charge for international ATM withdrawals when just about all of their competitors don’t, I don’t even think they have a way to get cash into the account yet, and their account doesn’t earn interest (some, but not all, of their competitors here in the US offer interest on balances in checking accounts). They really should have stayed in beta for a while longer.

That is also not my point. My point is that the performance of their UK business to date and the forecast performance of said business as they know these to be today, combined with the loss of passporting, may together be sufficient to push them over the edge of withdrawing from the UK market. Whereas the UK’s continuation in the EEA passporting regime might have led them to stay in the UK market, all other things being equal. Anyway, we’ll never know.

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Most of the time, yes. But i would drag and drop funds and pay back transactions from my spaces many several times per day. The process takes seconds. Monzo takes way too many steps to achieve the same result, and using pots in this way breaks how Summary works and that drives me nuts. They are two half baked unfinished features that work against each other to create the most frustrating mobile UX I’ve ever experienced.

This is precisely my point. The utility N26 Spaces provide is what allows people to budget in whatever way works for them. You just can’t do this with the tools Monzo provide, because it feels like they over-thought them, over engineered them, and then implemented them poorly. It baffles me that summary even needs to rely on incoming payments to work, or that it doesn’t harmonise seamlessly with pots.

Interested to know what you mean when you say summary doesn’t work with pots very well. Pots doesn’t have an impact on summary to my knowledge, or is that the problem you’re referring to?

This seems to depend on how you’re using summary, and wether or not budgets is enabled. With budgets turned off, I can’t use pots for budgeting because the summary keeps telling I have no money for spending. With budgets enabled, pots don’t interfere with summary, but then my subscriptions still get deducted from my summary allowance, but aren’t added back when I transfer back from my fixed expenses pot. I can’t add all of my subscriptions as committed spend either, as the billing periods monzo offer for recurring transactions are too limited. My dog food for example is every 7 weeks. My smol laundry capsules every 3 weeks. My Saturo subscription every 10 weeks Xbox GamePass ultimate every 3 months, amongst others.

I wonder if users are seeking an over-reliance on the budgeting features. Seems that some feel annoyed that all the thinking is not being done for them.

Maybe the message that budgeting would be so much easier with the Monzo toolkit was over-egged. “Smart” is one thing, but expecting multiple scenarios to be neatly accommodated for each user is quite another.

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If this is the case, then these banks are marketing themselves entirely wrong. It also seems to be their main focus of innovation to differentiate themselves from legacy banking apps, as many of them offer better experiences sans budgeting and push notifications.

But no, Monzo are the ones trying to do the thinking for me, because they are in a sense dictating how one should budget rather than allowing the user to dictate to Monzo how they want to budget. That’s the key difference between Spaces and summary/pots.

Simple Bank (and others) in the US have an implementation that does 100% of the thinking for you, requiring zero input from the user, without relying on income or budget periods, only giving users a safe to spend amount, and it works. N26 provides a tool that functions similar to the envelope budgeting system which works for everyone regardless of income periods, and gives it a polished and intuitive user interface that’s extremely easy to us. Monzo are trying to both, and besides counteracting each other, summary has too much friction and can’t work for everyone because of the period restrictions and reliance on income, and pots are a hassle because they lack an intuitive UI.

We get that you don’t like the UI. You’ve said it many times. Your dislike doesn’t make it bad though. It just means that you don’t like it.

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Absolutely. Not certain which of my posts you’re replying to, but my recent replies have been on the topic of the functionality of the budgeting tools, not necessarily the UI. On that note, I’ve usually only been responding to those who either critique or inquire my opinions of frustration with Monzo. It just happens that the only way to justify an opinion is to restate it as such, so your remark here is construed as both rude and unjust.

How is that technically possible though? You can’t provide a safe to spend figure without knowing the period of time that applies to.

They constantly look towards the next 30 days, and is made of account balance minus fixed expenses and savings goals.

Any idea who the target market is for Simple?

I would assume the same as Monzo’s. They were one of the kickstarts of the neobank revolution before being bought by BBVA.