Interesting that Starling processes 30,000 scanned cheques per month. They don’t identify how many relate to business accounts.
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Take a low guess of £10 each and that’s £3.6 million a year. But Monzo who are losing millions and have a larger user base are shunning those deposits. Still doesn’t make sense to me why they abandoned cheque imaging.
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So are banks 
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Perhaps they are but they aren’t extinct yet!
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I couldn’t use Apple Pay at a ford garage today but strangely they did say they accepted cheques!
I paid by card but just an example of your ‘old people’.
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Very interesting read.
Does make me wonder though what Monzo’s path to profitability really is because I don’t see it. With Starling I it’s very obvious. Monzo seems more like a company that’s going to forever burn investors cash, growing value and losses until it’s swallowed up by a larger banking entity that knows how to make a profit.
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By definition old people cannot become extinct, as they are replaced by the next generation 
Yup, my son already gives me a funny look when I pay for things with a physical card and not my phone.
From my cold, dead hands kid!.
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Starling making profit is no surprise.
From the word go, when they launched their current account, they offered something no one in the industry was offering, overdraft of up to £5000 for most customers, interest on their current account, easy to put money in at any post office and international bank account with a SWIFT number. It may be new on the market but it really did feel like a real bank account something Monzo was not offering at the time.
It may not have the same large customer base as Monzo, but it has attracted the big spenders, big savers, and big borrowers. It should be no surprise in these difficult times when people are putting more into their savings or borrowing why they are now breaking even in this current economic down turn.
While monzo has a loyal base. and trying to put out an image as an ethical bank, it needs to break away from these ethics and take a gamble offer similar services as Starling has offered for a long time.
The survival on Monzo is important, for competition and to encourage continued innovation in the UK banking industry, without Monzo there would be none and I am willing to bet banks such as Starling or Revolut would not even have existed. .
I have decided to use Starling as my main bank, Monzo has not yet offered anything that would encourage me and others who use Starling to switch.
Think it is time that Monzo ups its game rather what I see is a current obsession of pleasing its existing customer base.
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I thought starling existed first as a bank/business?
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Cheques are still issued by businesses for refunds, it only takes writing out a cheque and sending out to the customers address and they met their legal obligation of a refund and can forget about the customer.
Without cheques, they have to attempt contact the customer (which is easier said than done), make sure they are they customer (not a random stranger), obtain the account number and sort-code (expense of verifying the details are correct). transfer the money and deal with the logistics of the customer complains they have not received the money.
The cost of logistics of sending a cheque out is a lot cheaper than transferring the money over.
True, but Monzo was around offering current accounts as a none bank well before starling, and I would argue Monzo started the ball rolling .
They had a prepaid card. Also sure Monzo founder worked for starling first …
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When I opened a starling account, they only were offering services for several months. Monzo already been offering their “prepaid” card service and already around 500,000 ish customers. Monzo then launched their current account 6 months after Starling.
In a clear dig at the plight of her rivals, Boden says the coronavirus emergency has "focused minds in the fintech sector on business models and exposed those without a clear path to profitability.
I don’t want to sound harsh as I have a Starling account and absolutely think the product is fantastic. However, it’s comments like this that really make me wish and will Monzo to smash it out of the park this year and come back fighting and become even stronger.
They can hardly shout from the rooftops about BBLs for example when Martin Lewis’ MSE referred them to the regulator.
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I personally considered it a dig - not her first time using such coded language - and it feels a bit true to form
When N26 announced they were leaving the UK, Monzo were quick out of the blocks to offer sympathy and assistance to the staff while it took a while for Starling to follow up later by rather crudely moving straight past that to instead make a grab for their customers
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On the point about Starling’s apparently older and richer customer base, well done to them at this stage, but can that pattern scale? Not just about the tech and support
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Don’t remind me. There’s a time and a place for witty marketing tactics. A bank shutting down and abandoning their customers is not one of them. I feel like the only people on Twitter that enjoyed the remarks were fans of Starling, because in fairness to them it was a good dig both at N26, and their users. But as an N26 customer at the time, it rubbed me completely the wrong way. Monzo’s approach was much more tact. Starling would have been my next port of call had it not been for that tweet.
I do still plan to give them another shot, and they’ve removed my phone number so that I’m able to sign up, but I’ve not got round to signing up again yet.
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Yes. And ‘making money work for everyone’ might be great for marketing, but it is a terrible business strategy. Drop it, and focus on customers who can help towards profit first and foremost.
Sign up, you wont regret it.
I have both Monzo Plus and Starling, but if I had to choose between the two right now id go with Starling. Starling is my main bank account and my main joint account. I have more faith in them, especially as they have contracts providing services for likes of the government. Monzo doesnt appear to have these “finger in all the pies” situations.
Also, on this forum, on a very regular basis there are posts from new users implying that Monzo are all bad and are at fault for some sort of total farce that has appeared to have gone on, usually Fraud related…
Im still awaiting hearing about a similar issue with a Starling account. This to me suggests that Monzo maybe offers accounts out in a less strict manner than Starling does, hence the customer figures being different.
I might be totally wrong, but thats my two pence worth.
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