Starling Feedback

Agreed, I don’t spend enough a day for it to be useful visually. It would be so much better as a weekly or monthly breakdown. It’s essentially useless to me so I’d rather they chucked some marketplace offers on it or put a tiny preview of goals.

I remember someone on their forums posted a mockup of a Monzo-like screen where the balance is in the top left and a small circle graph in the top right (where you’d see the “spent today” on Monzo) and the transaction feed below - I actually liked that. The small circle graph like that is actually a nice gimmick but still a gimmick - I like it if it’s small but don’t take over my entire screen with it please.

Do you still have an account with Starling? Did they have any significant new features lately? Since starting my new job I haven’t had the time to keep up with the Fintech scene really and I closed my account so can’t see it myself anymore either.

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They introduced “goals” which is essentially “Pots”. You can’t have a joint goal with another user though, I think they should change that. And Apple/Android Pay but that was awhile back- probably the most exciting things though. They’ve refined direct debits and if a payment doesn’t go through it’ll now tell you why (didn’t know it wasn’t a thing before!).

If you’ve closed your account with them you can’t reopen it, which seems a little unfriendly to me.

Apple Pay was around my time with them - that’s actually the biggest thing I miss about Starling - paying with my watch is awesome when I’m out getting drinks or ice cream or snacks (which pretty much means every 5 minutes :joy:)

I think the reason behind not reopening your account is just because they haven’t built that functionality yet and their system probably wouldn’t plan nice with the same person (identified by name/date of birth and possible ID/passport number) having two accounts so can’t just create a new one either.

Fair enough, wonder if you could go through CS to request them to manually delete the old one or something.

Re: graph, I think someone did a couple of mockups and suggestions for their university project, and I really liked the bar graph that would pop up after tapping on the pulse graph. I have no need for the pulse graph since I top up only when needed (the graph is a mass of peaks), but dipping into your overdraft shows a very pretty yellow line. It’s tempting :joy: can’t wait to see all the new features! Don’t have the CA unfortunately, are overdrafts live yet?

I don’t know about :monzo: overdrafts, last time I tried to get one (just to try it out - I don’t like easy access to debt) they said it wasn’t live yet. There is some info here if you’ve got the time to read through it all (I would’ve done it but it’s way too late tonight and I’m so tired) but the general opinion is that it’s bloody expensive (which I guess is fair enough - Monzo has to make money some way and I’d rather see them make good $$$ that way than pretend to be cheap but then scam you with fees every time they have the chance).

You should definitely apply for the current account preview, it seems they’ve been giving them out like peanuts lately, even Danny eventually got one. :joy:

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Can’t believe he’s got one before me! It was supposed to be a running joke that he’d never get one :joy: I’ve applied again after they sent me an email about it, but they’ve not given me one yet. Oh well, no rush. Just would love to move my direct debits over. Same to the overdrafts though, I’d rather not have one, but I’d love to see it on the graph and play around with it.

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Did you use your prepaid card much? I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re rolling it out to heavy users first (makes sense from a business point of view) - in my case :monzo: prepaid was my main card since January (every month I would top it up with all my money only leaving enough for the single DD that I had) so all my banking was done on Monzo so I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why I got my invite relatively early, though I did feel bad for Danny - he’s an investor, he should’ve got one before me.

Oh and I just remembered, Monzo plans to offer a free 20£ “buffer” (not sure if that’s only when you get an overdraft or if it’s for everyone even if you don’t want to apply for an OD) but in the latter case it’s good as you’ll be able to play around with the graph without actually having that much debt (and I believe this buffer won’t even show on your credit report). :+1:

I may have helped to ruin the joke. Sorry to be a buzzkill :joy:

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Well, you’ve made him a very happy man at least :wink: I thought investors were supposed to get theirs early! I think you jumped in at the right time :ok_hand:t3:

@anon23935806 I do almost all my banking on there, all my day-to-day spending- save for large payments like school fees and rent that I keep on Santander but those are one-off payments mostly (£17k would bust my limits entirely :sweat_smile: and I pay the full year’s rent, to avoid hassle with guarantors). Some PayPal transactions don’t go through it either. Maybe I’m doing too many online or non-UK transactions? The bulk of it is UK transactions though.

Investors have priority for the full current account rollout which will be starting very soon :grinning:

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Paypal is and has always been a pain, I don’t think it’s an issue with Monzo in particular. If you’ve got a Santander card maybe you can try and get that linked to your Paypal account and see if it helps?

Also why use Paypal in the first place? I try to avoid them as much as possible and it always ends up working better to pay by card directly.

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I have both accounts on PayPal! I can’t add the Monzo prepaid card without having a current account on there, like Hugh pointed out before. Some PayPal transactions do go through Monzo, others don’t (I never know what the distinction is, but I pay through Monzo as much as possible). Also some transactions stubbornly refuse to accept the Monzo exchange rate and keeps switching to PayPal’s shittier rate :roll_eyes: I sell handmade soaps and clothes I don’t need on eBay occasionally, so I need one :sweat_smile: a lot of online shopping sites prefer PayPal too/ have specific payment types like alipay and other online wallets that I don’t have, so PayPal is the only option.

Also I realised we have derailed the discussion entirely, Leaders feel free to move to a separate thread if needed :bowing_woman:t2:

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Problem with :monzo: Intercom chat, though, is the view is a list of queries, and each is summarised using the last message sent. This means all my chats are essentially shown as “Thanks for helping, have a nice day…” and are indecipherable from one another. A topic title on each would help a lot!

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Oh hai guise!

Did I see my name get mentioned? :new_moon_with_face:

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Yeah, that is exactly the sort cringe I hated and put me off the brand a bit!

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I don’t frequently look back at it, since they’re mostly one-off bugs. I think the coining of a topic should be up to the user (like email subjects)? But that would mean the chat format will be less like a chat. I don’t think it’s a major hardship to check each one separately, but then again I don’t have a lot of conversations with CS that I need to check through.

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Maybe the solution would be to display the first message of the conversation and not the last (unless there’s an unread message in which case the last will make a lot more sense to have) and have an intelligent filter to strip the hello/thanks formalities so it fits in the small space available.

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You would probably start with pleasantries like “Hi there I was wondering if” “Hi for some reason I found” “I have an issue with…” which would end up having the same problem as closing sign-offs imo.

Conversation would be better with a subject set by the user and that should be the summary view. IMO

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