Just thinking ahead a little - it’s likely next year I’ll be relocating to the US with work. One question I always had regardless of Monzo or not is the best way to transfer any money / savings from a UK account into a new account based in a new country without spending half of your savings in fee’s just to transfer it across.
If Monzo is available in the US by the time I moved, I guess it should be fairly simple to do a complete transfer of all funds - pots, savings, current account balance into a new US account, right? Or would it just be a case of using the in app “send money internationally” option?
Kind regards,
Max
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phildawson
(Sorry, I will have to escalate this.)
2
I don’t know for sure but I would have thought you would need to have a UK and open a new US account and use the TransferWise within the UK version to send it to your US account. Then recreate all the pots again.
I don’t know how much you are moving but £37 to transfer £10K atm.
Would be ace if Monzo makes the process a lot smoother or give a better rate .
Edit: If you are going to be moving serious cash from a sale of a house etc then I’d use a specialist currency broker otherwise you’ll be paying a grand to move a few hundred thousand. ( £2,793.22 for £1m with TransferWise)
I didn’t realise how reasonable the cost would be for TransferWise to be honest!
Even so, a smooth Monzo > Monzo process would definitely be a huge selling point to “convert” users that move countries (especially if Monzo establish themselves globally in the future)
Would still have costs associated but at least Transferwise sets the bar for those.
phildawson
(Sorry, I will have to escalate this.)
5
I’d still also recommend getting a quote from https://www.westernunion.com/gb/en/send-money/app/start (selecting bank account) depending on how much you are sending (> £50k). It’s usually fairly close but might give you a few extra
This is bit off topic, but maybe someone knows why does EU/UK banks ask if you have US bank account before you open account with them? Does that put you in a spotlight for probable money laundering or something like that?..and if you have, they might not allow you to open account with them.
They ask this to comply with the US’s FATCA legislation. The US treasury is very, very interested in what their taxpayers are doing with any money overseas.
Hey Max! Thanks for asking, it’s a great question.
Effectively, what we are launching in the US should for now be considered a separate product to our UK product. The main difference is that what we are launching in the US, isn’t a bank, but a financial services app and debit card in partnership with an existing sponsoring bank.
Because of that, a “migration” such as what you’ve described isn’t quite as simple and isn’t something we’ve scoped out. It’s also not something we anticipate a huge amount of demand for - since most UK users won’t be in a position to open a US account.
It sounds like a very cool idea though! But realistically speaking, if you are moving to the US and opening one of our US accounts, it’d most likely just be a straightforward international transfer.
Makes total sense Maybe you should consider an incentive (like we’ll cover 3% of your international transfer charge in the form of a payment to your account) as a thankyou for sticking with Monzo when relocating to a company that supports it?
Qualifying criteria could be:-
Must have held a UK Monzo account for over 2 years
Must be transferring a minimum of ÂŁ10,000
Must have a positive UK Monzo balance (no loans outstanding or overdraft)
Not that you guys I guess need an incentive - but I know my company are pushing me to open up a bank account before I move with the big guys like Bank of America, and I’ll stand firm and stick with Monzo - just a thought
Is this the plan long term? Or is Monzo looking for their own charter?
I can see utilising a partner bank working out long term as long as the product is fully featured. i.e. not just a prepaid card like CashApp / GreenDot.
Hi. Is this likely to be a feature in the next 6 months? Or is it even a plan for the future. This is literally the one big miss for me at the moment and is the one thing stopping me from adopting my Monzo US account as my main account and getting my salary paid in, etc.
Other competitor accounts allow some version of this, for example revolut allow this but it takes approx 1 working day but better than nothing. I also understand this works one way currently - that is, you can use your UK Monzo card to top up your US Monzo card (odd to have to do this…why isn’t it a built in transfer feature?).
So…why isn’t it available the other way around? Literally would be a one stop global account essentially, all managed in one app. I’d have all my bills paid for out of Monzo and all my salary etc paid in. It’s already my main account in the UK.
Ultimately I guess the goal is to focus on other target markets and not just UK expats…but the best way to do that surely would do have all the UK expats adopt it as their main account and it feels like this would be a big win in this area? There’s obviously a reason for it not being offered but can’t see what that would be.
Anyway, if you could help to manage expectations that would be great…
On a tangent to this topic, one thing I’ve seen at a credit union I recently signed up for made me wonder if Monzo could implement something similar. If it was just about the functionality of a bank account and you didn’t mind mixing your money and saving it in one currency, would it be possible to implement functionality where you get a UK sort code and account number attached to a US account or a US routing and account number attached to your UK account? I just signed up for Service Credit Union, which gives me both a US routing/account number and a German IBAN, both good for payments in and out of my US dollar checking account. And coming back to this:
I’ve got a US Revolut account and it already has both a USD balance with US routing/account number and a GBP balance with UK sort code/account number. I haven’t fiddled with the GBP balance much, but I do seem to be able to convert instantly, so I’m curious as to where the GBP balance function falls short of a proper Revolut UK account (that you’d transfer money between the two and keep them separately).
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