Screenshots of all the important parts. For £2.99 you really can’t go wrong.
Basic terms are you must use the card to purchase whatever you’re claiming on, it must be new at the time of purchase and the depreciation I mentioned earlier. Up to £1000 combined cover per year on Plus, not bad at all.
You can pull it up in the app by going to buy it, confirm your payment option (monthly or annually), don’t worry it won’t charge you, and full terms are on the next page with a final confirm button.
Very good of you to post all that, thanks. As you suspected I’d not wanted to confirm my payment option until I’d read this. They don’t make it entirely clear when you’re actually ‘in’, should make the terms a bit easier to find.
I’ll give them a proper read later, but for £30/year, I’ll probably do it when I next buy something (current phone etc too old / not purchased with Revolut…). Only downside is I’ll lose a bit of cashback not being able to buy it with AmEx.
I do think Revolut/Starling have correctly figured out that £2/3 (possibly <£5?) is something people will just do (and I say that as someone who is very anti bundled insurance…). Monzo Plus/Premium on the other hand need to justify the cost in people’s minds…
£3/month just for virtual cards (attached to pots), Monzo?
Well. Started using Revolut for my cpas to test out the pockets. Just had my card frozen for suspicious activity for a £1.99 now TV payment! Easy to unfreeze, but not sure if I’ll be able to now release the funds lol
I thought this had happened already…
Yeah that’s right, they have (I think) a Lithuanian licence. I just thought they’d already started the process of a UK licence application - I think I remember there being some noise about that last year.
They applied and they either withdrew the application late or it was rejected
I’d be interested to see how this goes, considering their crypto-based features.
They made big chat of how quick and freewheeling they are while Monzo are now boring and in the slow lane. Might come back to haunt them a bit as lots of the “fun” will have to stop
I hear this a lot, but it doesn’t really resonate for me. Starling is good at releasing new banking products (euro account, connected card etc), but the features that compare to Monzo (by which I mean the functionality associated with the personal current account in the app) seems largely static. Could you give some examples?
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.
UK here they come!
If Revolut gets it, it’ll put the bank on my financial radar.
I’m still very sceptical of the company’s ethos and approach. And I’m still a bit burnt about the time I tried to open an account and it all went horribly wrong. So there have quite a steep hill to climb for me, I’m afraid.
Good for competition, though. I hope that Monzo rises to the challenge…
50% of their UK customers making Revolut their main bank account feels like a stretch. But game on (if they get a banking licence).
I’d be well tempted to switch to Revolut if they get a full license. With all the features it supports it’s much more of a finance hub than any of the other fin techs.
Just got a rundown of some new features in the Revolut app, they’ll be a very compelling option when they get their full license!
Interesting
The fintech could even be asked to shut its crypto-trading product in the UK to satisfy both the FCA and the PRA, who co-manage the bank licence process.
I thought that was a technically seperate entity?
12 million customers and a push to bolster the global compliance team took it to just 600 people…
Explains a lot.
It seems compliance is something they’re very heavy with. It goes someway to explaining why Revolut, Monzo etc. take very heavy handed approaches to account blocking / closures if look at them wrong where traditional banks are a bit softer.
