I appreciate it’s still “within the 2 hours for faster payments” service - But any legacy bank I’ve done this with previously has been instant.
I did another transfer later in the day, and it still took 20/30 mins.
It’s not a massive issue, but I often move money around so I can pay from different accounts. If I’m doing that, it normally means I’d like it to show there and then, which is a bit of a pain.
Still… The notifications are great, and the ease of paying someone is great, so it’s manageable.
I’ve often found that if I make multiple payments in a day to the same account the first gets there straight away, and subsequent ones are delayed a bit.
The point I was trying to make in a roundabout way is that if the payments have previously been instant between your other bank and Monzo then a new delay points to some sort of technical issue at the time rather than any sort of purposeful slowing down of the transfer.
I did try Starling a few months back, only for a few weeks closed it down using CASS to get the free £125 from First Direct for joining.
The things I didn’t like about Starling were:
1: Complex login to app
2: Didn’t like the UI, found it confusing & a bit too much going on in places
3: They appear to cover up certain things as discussed above
3: They appear slightly more traditional in their approach to things (compared to Monzo).
What I do like over Monzo:
1: The amount of features!
2: Interest on the account.
Mentioning the two points above, does anyone know if starling are on their way to making any profit yet? As providing interest and free ATM withdrawals like Monzo did must be costing a fair wack!
My heart is with Monzo, what mostly puts Monzo ahead (excluding lack of current features as they are catching up) is the community and the general openness of the company, this is what really sets Monzo as the bank of the future for me currently.
I’ve never had an issue with multiple transfers in a row with starling. Are these large values or are you just a known money launderer? if you are goto HSBC (just watched dirty money on Netflix )
My concern with all this fast payment system is what happens when a mistake is made and the money ends up in the wrong account or maybe even subject to a fraudster
How do you get the money back and are their any safety mechanisms for such an eventuality
It’s one thing to send money instantly it’s another when you want to get it back !
It’s not necessarily a quick process, unfortunately. The person who ends up with the money might well dispute it and drag it out. Obviously mistakes sometimes happen, but it’s really, really important to double check, triple check, quadruple check the account number and sort code you’re sending to to ensure it’s correct!
I don’t see it lasting either. If they find a way, then fair play to them.
I’ll be the first to stand up and congratulate them. But if the average customer ends up costing the company £10 a year in overseas ATM fees (which I think may have been roughly what we were seeing before we introduced the fees), then even at 500,000 customers, the company is losing £5million a year on that alone.
It’s a slippery slope. If your investors are happy, you can support it for the first few hundred thousand customers, and if you’re not growing super fast then perhaps that will take you 2 or 3 years and you can build up several other things in that time that generate enough revenue per customer to balance it out.
What we saw was a growth from 100,000 customers to 500,000 in less than 12 months from Jan 2017 to now so we had to act quickly in that regard.
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Anarchist
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The average customer, or the average customer who uses overseas ATMs?
Just wondering, because there is a significant difference.
Average customer. The folks that use overseas ATMs tend to cost us quite a bit more than that. And the folks who don’t, obviously don’t cost us anything in that regard.
Doesn’t Starling use phone number as part of their authentication? A horribly insecure yet incredibly annoying (if you’re out of the country) technique, frankly (though I don’t know details and I’m not a customer - I don’t think it’s the entirety of their auth, so I’m not calling the finished product insecure, simply that adding phone number creates a lot of hassle for not much security benefit).
if you are goto HSBC (just watched dirty money on Netflix 
)
