I’ve signed up this morning, and the on boarding experience was very impressive. So far it feels there’s a lot of inspiration taken from revolut here, but minified and simplified significantly. It feels incredibly polished.
Sign up requires photo of ID and a still photo of you face. No annoying video selfie, so great for me. A video selfie would have put me off and I wouldn’t have proceeded. I opted for the £5 plan on the 30 day trial. There’s no commitment and I plan to cancel at the end of the 30 days.
The App’s UI is very clean, and minimal. It’s navigation is similar to cash app by using swipe gestures.
There are 3 core interface panes (plus a Home Screen). I’ll discuss these now.
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the home screen - when you open the app for the very first time, this explains the gestures. It’ll also prompt you to order your card. After which, it’s just a plain white screen that says ‘Hi [Name]’
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The Accounts Screen - You swipe right from the home screen to access this. It reminds me a lot of the first version of Atom Bank. This has bubbles which represent your currency accounts. And each bubble shows you your account balance. The more money you have in each currency, the larger the bubble. This is the direction I eventually imagined Atom’s app would go in before they ditched it. You can tap on these bubbles to view your account details, and to top up, exchange, or initiate a bank transfer. Choosing the transfer option is also where you’ll find saved payees. At the top you have a total balance which combines your balances from all currencies to display a total in a currency of your choosing. The default for some reason was PLN, despite me being in the U.K. and using GBP. At the bottom is where you access your card. It peeks sort of like Monzo. I’ve ordered mine, and I presume this where I’ll be able to access card controls once it’s arrived.
Edit: added my first virtual card, which does indeed propagate here at the bottom of the accounts screen with the details and controls. You can rename the cards, lock or remove them, set daily limits with a max of £30k. And add it to Apple wallet. The cards are stacked at the bottom of the accounts screen with one of them peeking above the fold. It’s very similar to the UI of Apple’s wallet app here. It’s nice, I like it.
Here’s what the disposable card looks like in Apple Pay:
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The transaction feed - Swipe down from the home screen to access this. It’s a very simple list of transactions. I don’t yet know if there will be data enrichment, but I wouldn’t mind if there isn’t. The iconography is gorgeous and merchant logos would ruin the beauty here.
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Zenefits - swipe left from the home screen, and you see your Zenefits screen, which provides an overview of how much money each Zenefit has saved you. I want to go a little more in depth here and provide some screenshots, as they share example stories to demonstrate how the features work. I’m not sure how the savings are calculated for some of these though as they’re not going to be everyday uses, and for some are things they’ll rarely if ever need and are more of just a peace of mind offer.
The main Zenefits screen:
Zen Care:
This still feels like a well marketed MasterCard chargeback scheme with a slick process. They say the money is refunded instantly, and there’s a bit of a trend here which I’ll get to later in the post. I’m not sure how your savings will be calculated for this feature.
Extended Warranty:
This is self explanatory. It’s designed to replace the extended warranty you’ll find being promoted when you’re shopping at Argos, John Lewis, or Amazon for instance. It’s provided by Axa, so identical to what N26 offer in the EU. Your savings, I imagine, are estimated based on how much they think it would have costed to buy the extended warranty from the retailer.
Instant Cashback:
This is fairly self explanatory, your savings here will just be your income from cashback. They use referral links like Revolut do, and those are accessed by tapping on the bag icon at the top right of the Zenefits screen. There aren’t many offers available here, and most are for retailers I’ve never heard of. The most prominent one here is Aliexpress.
Exchange savings:
Also fairly self explanatory as to where the savings come from.
Heading back over to the accounts screen now, at the top left is is a button that takes you to the settings screen. My account is labelled as a founders edition personal account, presumable because these are relatively new, and I’m among the first to have signed up.
Here you can view your personal details and change your pricing plan. It’s also where you can contact support. There’s a button here too to show you your zenefits which is where you can enitiate a Zen Care refund.
There’s also a Zen Pay feature here, which lets you pay for something by scanning a QR code. Someone recently made a suggestion for Monzo to do something like this too. Must be a popular European thing, because I’ll never use this. The app also has a lovely soothing opening melody when you launch it. You can turn that on or off here, as well as enable biometrics.
Closing thoughts
This app feels incredibly polished and a joy to use. I like the features on offer, but it is a paid for only subscription offer. 2 tiers at 99p and £4.99. I think there’s some good value here though. It’s promoted entirely as a shopping card, so this is not intended to be your bank, but rather be used in conjunction with one. You get a sort code and account number, but I don’t think direct debits are supported.
I’ll give it some good use over the next month to know for sure, but this, on paper at least, looks an incredibly well made spending card. If you miss what Monzo used to be before they became a bank and want to go back to that segregation for spending money, I think there’s a solid option in ZEN here that will fulfil that in a really nice way.
The one negative interaction I had was trying to set up Apple Pay on the virtual card. It wasn’t automatic. It just took me to the wallet app and I had to go back and forth copying and pasting the card details. Should be an easy fix though.
I’ll report back when the physical card arrives, and comment on the quality, if it looks different in Apple Pay etc.
One thing I’ve noted in the graphics for the card is that the logo seems to have the same holographic shimmer as the Monzo Plus card logo does. In the app, this is actually reinforced with a small attention to detail that reminds me of the old iOS 6 volume slider in the music app. As your device move, the in app logo has an animated shimmer that moves as your device does. I love those things, and I’m sure I said somewhere it would have been nice for the Monzo Plus card in app to have the same sort of effect.
This is incredibly long so I may work on add a TL;DR later. Any questions?