šŸ“° Virgin Money is building a digital Bank

I would love a modern credit card provider; however given my existing experience with Virgin brands (Virgin Media and Mobile) Iā€™m sure they will find a way to screw it up.

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What do you mean by that? A quick google shows Virgin Money paid Ā£90m to HMRC in 2017, and collected a further Ā£41m on behalf of the taxman.

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Most of them are pretty bad (though the airlines well-loved), but in fairness the brands are all separate businesses. Also, Virgin Media is atrociously bad. I would have said it isnā€™t possible to get things more wrong. Until I signed up for Tandem :slight_smile:

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What you have to remember is Virgin media isnā€™t really a virgin group company itā€™s owned by Liberty Global and has just purchased the rights to the virgin name for 20 years

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All businesses associated to the Virgin brand should live the Virgin values regardless of equity held by Virgin Management.

I donā€™t think Virgin Media do this very well :wink:

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What are these ā€œVirgin valuesā€?

Ironic, isnā€™t it that half the Virgin brands taint the other half with their various missteps and management failures?

https://www.virgin.com/virgingroup/content/our-brand-0

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Just found them:

The Brandā€™s backbone is its values; providing heartfelt service, being delightfully surprising, red hot, and straight up while maintaining an insatiable curiosity and creating smart disruption.

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What a load of BS!

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Sounds a lot like Monzoā€™s :slightly_smiling_face:

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Difference is Monzo has honoured it in so many ways:

  • Being incredibly LGBT-friendly
  • Providing the best customer service out there, bar none
  • Amazing card acceptance (e.g. contactless magstripe support)
  • Fun events like last nightā€™s space talk
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I think that money would be better spent sorting out their terrible customer service. Cancelled my credit card with virgin after experiencing terrible customer service

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I think the only Virgin company Iā€™ve had good experiences with was Virgin Active (gyms) - everything else is awful.

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Obviously Branson doesnā€™t agree (or more likely doesnā€™t care) - but once you sell off businesses with your name on, you run a huge risk of just tainting everything that bears your name. You canā€™t claim to be ethical, you canā€™t control having a level of consistency between all the different things that bear your name. You just become a shapeless non-entity coasting on fake brand association for people that donā€™t know any better.

I mean, my good childhood memories of spending hours in Virgin Megastore donā€™t make it any more likely that Iā€™ll fly with Virgin Airlines or sign up to a Virgin Active gym :joy:

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Bit harsh :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

I donā€™t think itā€™s harsh, I imagine itā€™s what Branson coasts on - the idea that association of a positive experience with a high-performing company, like Virgin Airlines, might encourage people to use poor performing services such as Virgin Mobile - despite the companies having nothing to do with each other.

Perhaps ā€œless discerning peopleā€ is a nicer way of putting it :wink:

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I donā€™t think people think as much in those terms of a connected brand these days. If thereā€™s any ā€˜connectionā€™ itā€™s usually in the negative.

Fifteen years ago l bought into the Virgin brand l had Active, Energy, Mobile flew Atlantic. Now l have Active and Media because itā€™s a good product offer for me in terms of location, quality and price.

Maybe fifteen years back Monzo would have set out to offer current accounts, cards, etc because thatā€™s what brands in banking did (see first direct, cahoot, et al). Nowadays thereā€™s ā€˜confidenceā€™ that a brand can excel with one product and let others contribute without tarnishing the central brand.

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Iā€™m not so sure about that, you can coast on goodwill for years.

Nokia are doing well in the last year since they finally switched to making Android devices, despite the fact that the company has changed hands twice and all their products had been a complete shit-show for the last decade.

They still have a huge amount of goodwill from their original run and they finally made some strategic product decisions that can benefit from it!

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Prehaps they are nostalgic brands. I think Nokia certainly is. I fondly think back to my 3210, completely overlooking the thing gave me headaches and that l was rubbish at snake.

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