What’s interesting here (for me at least) is that the first of these is a Monzo own-goal - Starling maintaining a service shouldn’t be sometime to write home about. Monzo knows it’s broken, but won’t formally kill or cure it. I think that is quite emblamatic.
The second one - linked cards - I see as a separate product (I listed it as one Starling’s new banking products), but I see the overlap here, and share the frustration at the perceived lack of agility we’re seeing from Monzo. Indeed, I think there’s some revenue possibilities in offering (I’m making this up) for example, a card/pot for £1 month. I think back to this quote from Tom Blom in 2018:
Barclays launched ‘freeze your card’ very recently, which is fine. There is a saying in ice hockey: ‘You’ve got to skate where the puck is going’. If you skate at the puck, it will have moved so far ahead by the time you get there that you’ll have missed it. Banks are looking at us. We are the puck.
To get this back on topic, I see Revolut bringing innovation in the app, Starling keeping the app pretty stable (I mean where are budgeting and spend analytics?) but innovating in other financial products. Monzo is still ahead of the game for my needs - and have thrown a lot of their resource at paid accounts which are worthy but largely unremarkable - but I really want them to become the puck again. They’ll end up being Barclays in Tom’s analogy if not.
As others have said, it’ll be intriguing to see what happens to Revlout once the weight of regulation is on them.