As much as I understand your point, they aren’t making excuses. Monzo don’t mention Apple Pay anywhere.
It terms of being detrimental to the consumer facing product - I would say it has the exact opposite effect. Creating their own payment processor is to avoid a poor user experience.
And as much as I understand your point, from a customer-facing perspective not a lot has changed since the prepaid, the actual work involved to change already existing services and app functionaly to now work with current account is obviously taking up their time. And I assume now that is complete or almost complete, they can begin working on adding new features.
I had a quick look at starling… wasn’t planning on creating an account but I have done it now. The app (android) seems much more feature rich. I would feel more comfortable keeping my money in starling. It just seems a little more professional at the moment. Although I do prefer the corporate persona that Monzo has so hopefully they can reach feature parity at some point.
I would recommend carrying a backup card until Starling moves away from their unreliable card processor as they’ve got a history of outages already, and no doubt more to come.
Monzo do mention ApplePay right within the Monzo app so to say they don’t mention it anywhere is incorrect. That being said, I never mentioned ApplePay myself as it isn’t a priority for me. Budgeting features are as I’m saving for a house and can be bad at saving.
I understand the backend stuff was needed to be done and that it will have future benefits for Monzo customers but people don’t see that and Monzo’s own processor has gone down too as its still new. Just looking at the forums, you see people stating how they like what’s introduced and how they could be made even better. People are quite excited about Monzo and want to see things move forward. You are right, now is the time the features need to start rolling off the production line. Especially when other providers are maturing or incoming into the UK market with fully featured products (and their own processors).
I noticed that they use GPS. I can’t seem to find any plans on their website or forum to change to an an house system.
I think my point still stands though. Even as a supporter of Monzo, I feel that starling gives a much better impression of being a fully featured account and of being more professional at the moment. (although that may all change as soon as I have a problem based on the stories i have read in this thread haha)
I agree with you that in terms of features Starling is ahead of Monzo, however
being more professional
That’s a matter of taste and preferences IMO. From my experience, the more “professional” a company appears the more they waste my time with stupid processes & papers (come on, it’s 2017 already!), where as “unprofessional” companies like Monzo actually solve my problems and allow me to get stuff done.
In fact, we kinda see it with Starling I think, their customer service is inferior to Monzo’s (but still light-years ahead of legacy banks) and although they have a community they seem to be ignoring a lot of it (I reported some huge usability issues back in August that are still not fixed).
Yeah, I have yet to experience any of this yet. As I said, I have just signed up for the account. its just the very first impression I got.
As for customer service, I currently bank with First Direct and absolutely love their customer service and I am not really prepared to settle for anything less. Monzo seem good enough at the moment (I don’t find the in app chat to be as quick as just calling FD) but I have no idea what starling are like.
What’s letting them down isn’t as much their customer service agents as the platform itself. They use Zendesk. It is awful, like really really awful. A chat is actually a live, synchronous connection to an advisor, which means if you don’t babysit the thing for a minute or two (or you know, just let the screen go to sleep) it cuts out and you have to start all again with a different advisor.
The whole point of chat is it’s somewhat asynchronous, so I can keep doing other stuff and only interact every 15 minutes or so, like text messages. Their “chat” defeats the whole purpose of it, at that point I might as well just call them.
For that to be published 29th December it must have been in the works for a long time. A lot of the information was outdated such as the ATM fees vote and the need to have Test flight installed.
It is clearly not up to date, and if written after the ATM vote debacle Monzo would have probably scored worse. Though each to their own. Most of us judge on our personal feelings not someone elses rankings. Also it is clear from the comments about Testflight that the author was using an iPhone and not trying both apps.
I signed up on Starling’s mailing list in the very early days, but decided to stick with monzo who seemed much more communicative/open, more dynamic in terms of technology.
However I admit that last week I finally decided to give starling a go too. Almost entirely due to the fact that starling offers Apple Pay right now, with immediate notifications, whilst Monzo does not. Had monzo had apple pay I doubt I’d have looked at starling.
Overall so far:
Starling’s sign up was if anything easier than monzo. The actual application was similar, but the ability to immediately use one’s account via Apple pay, with in-app adding of the virtual card even before physical arrives was very impressive, and for me a first
Starling’s transaction locatino data seems more geared around the registered business address of a company rather than the location of purchase. Both are valid locations and arguably both should be shown, but I certainly like to see WHERE I was, which monzo does mostly get right. Starling does not.
The monzo card stands out starling’s (from the picture) merely looks professional. Hard to say which approach is best, but as a new entrant I think standing out will win more custom & questions. I also think the starling logo looks sleek, monzo
no balance timeline on starling, just a simple list. monzo wins here
I noticed starling offers overdrafts straight away (fortunately not something I need right now)
I think what’s more interesting is what the ‘big banks’ do. Last year I switched RBS-> Barclays as RBS was so very stale and going nowhere. Barclays have actually been improving CS, and capability but still don’t offer all that monzo does in terms of real time notifications and simplicity of interaction in the app. They do though of course offer a full service (including web ui, apple pay etc), so right now my ‘main’ account remains with them
I decided to try Starling simply for Apple Pay. The lack of Apple Pay is one of the things stopping me transitioning to Monzo as my main bank, limited pot functionality/lack of multiple accounts being the other.
Trying to avoid being subjective (easier said than done), after c 3 weeks of Starling V’s Monzo I thought I’d share my personal experience (on an iPhone). For reference I’m not an overdraft customer:
Monzo
Targets
Daily spend in notifications
Widget
Spending graph thing
Notes and receipts on transactions
DD/bank transfer payments in spending
Starling
Apple Pay
Transaction type (Apple Pay, contactless, etc)
Statements (coming soon to Monzo!)
Top ups inc Apple Pay (Monzo does have this!)
For me, ultimately it comes down to are Apple Pay and in-app Top Ups worth the other user-experience elements. I’ve decided not! I found the lack of inclusion of bank transfers in the spending breakdown within Starling very frustrated. It did also highlight how frustrating the lack of in-app top-ups with Monza is.
Being subjective, I’d agree with others that Starling feels more ‘professional’ and more like a ‘real’ bank; however Monzo feels much more transparent and community driven (customer-led!?) but thats a personal view.
Are top-ups in Monzo being rolled out gradually or something? I’ve been topping up my current account by debit card and Apple pay for a while now. Go to Account, then to Top up, and then choose from three options – bank transfer, debit card or Apple.
