Came across Zero yesterday. They seem to be another Tred/Algbra eco banking ‘movement’ and are based in Cardiff. You can sign up to waiting list at their website zero.co.uk and there’s this article about them here from May.
Apologies if there’s a thread about them elsewhere, but they looked interesting and nothing came up in the search. Does anyone know anything else about them? What are their chances do you think?
“Balance £30,200” 
The card design has a Hyperjar vibe about it.
“No need to pre-fund your account to pay with your Zero card.”
So they’ll just not make any money?
Maybe it’s a Currensea type deal?
I tried to find something about this, as I suspected that you actually pay from another account but it would help if their FAQ’s were not this:
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
But some of the details:
• Fees: No fees for using the card or account will be charged, nor will there
be fees for inactivity or foreign exchange fees above the Mastercard rate
• Card limits: Your card/account can be used up to the following limits:
o Up to 100 card transactions per day
o Up to £4250 in a single card transaction
o Up to £10,000 per day on card transactions
o Up to £100,000 per year on card transactions
o Up to £25,000 every four days on card transactions
o Up to four ATM withdrawal per day
o Max £500 ATM withdrawal per day
o Max £1000 ATM withdrawal over four days
Where did you find the FAQs? I can’t see it on their website.
Is it Lorem Ipsum, or just the Wikipedia article about Lorem Ipsum (the latter is worse) 
I read through their Terms and Conditions and it linked to FAQs but they… well, they aren’t finished.
What is it with these startups building mostly fancy websites where everyone gives themselves ridiculously grandiose titles such as “Chairman of the board” “Chief sustainability officer” “software developer”*
I give them six months if that before they’re gone, are we entering a new .com bubble of fintechs?
*ok that last one I put in for a bit of a joke.
I’m surprised they sprung up, I think we’re in the market consolidation phase. Fana never even got to an app stage, though it’s still languishing as a web app.
They did/have . I had the app.
Indeed they do. Colour me surprised
Reminds me of FROST app 
Don’t see anything to stand out really 
Hello, Richard Theo here - i am one of the founders at Zero and just noticed this thread. Great fan of Monzo and active customer for years. We founded Zero to try and bring some focus to the continued negative effect of money on climate change e.g. banks still lending and investing your money into fossil fuel production etc. It’s also intended to help people understand elements of their lifestyle that are high impact and provide options to help reduce that impact. This is something of increasing appeal to young people globally. I was formerly the founder & CEO of Wealthify the investing app and a few other fintech things too. And we have an amazing team of people with a ton of experience to help make it a success. Obviously at this early stage it’s not perfect so please be forgiving but we’ve got a waitlist that you can join if you’d like to give it a try when we release in the next couple of months. Just like in the early days of Monzo, we’re really looking for our community to contribute to making it the best it can be.
So, I just got to the top of the waiting list and signed up to give it a try.
Obviously, a beta product at the moment so it’s definitely ‘bare bones’ of an account.
The sign up process was pretty smooth (after you get to the top of the waiting list and get a referral code). Scan your passport or driving licence, quick head-shot video and then about a 90 second wait while it verified everything.
You can choose between 3 different cards - Sea, Land or Sky (you can see the designs on their website https://zero.co.uk) and I choose Sea cos it’s blue (although that could mean that it’ll get confused slightly with Chase - maybe I should’ve gone with the green Land card).
Compared to other fintech banks - paying money in was a little slow - but you’re talking about maybe a 1 minute or so, compared to paying money into Starling or Chase where I get the notification from them saying money has been received before I get the confirmation from Monzo that they’ve sent the money.
Sending money - I got a ‘unable to check details’ error when I tried to send money back. After getting that twice, you get a ‘are you sure this isn’t a scam?’ error and then it moves on to confirming the transfer where it claims it did check and confirm all the details. After that, sending the actual money over was quicker than recieving (less than 20 seconds to get notification from Chase it had received it).
There’s no ‘address book’ of previous payments at the moment. So, it doesn’t remember who you’ve paid to make it easier to pay them again. Also, I didn’t notice any option when making the payment to set it up as a Standing Order.
They’ve got a ‘Top up Account’ option to pay money into the account, but at the moment it just shows you your sort code and account number. I suspect the plan will be eventually to get that linked to open banking so you can pay by app. They do already have an open banking integration where you can link to your other bank accounts for them to produce your ‘GreenScore’. I’ve linked my Monzo and Chase accounts although the GreenScore hasn’t kicked in yet so it may still be under development and not live yet (or it may just take a while to work this out and it’ll show up later).
Full card details are available in the app, but at the moment no Apple Pay (and presumably no Google Pay either). Card controls allow you to freeze your card, but that’s it - no option to disable only certain payments like contactless, card swipe, chip and pin etc or gambling controls.
Customers get ‘Community Shares’ - you can get more through a referral link which will be available to customers once they launch. The community shares will be worth something if Zero does an IPO. Slightly conflicting agenda maybe between wanting to develop a ‘Sustainable’ banking product focusing on fighting Climate Change etc. but then also having a specific target to get to an IPO where whatever sustainability plans they have will be subject to the whims of whatever Saudi-Arabian investor decides.
It’ll be interesting to see how fast they develop this - things I would expect to be on the plan before ‘full’ launch would be:
If the main plan is that this is a ‘glorified’ spending card then number (1) definitely needs to be sorted - and also Apple/Google Pay needs adding. If they do intend this to be a full standard bank account then (2) needs sorting as well.
There’s no spending breakdown as far as I can spot (maybe that show up once I’ve spent something) and also I don’t know what merchant data is shown. I need to wait for the card to arrive and I’ll report back then.
Definitely no option for any ‘mini/side accounts’ (ie - savings accounts or pots/spaces) or round-up/‘save the change’.
I’m trying to sign up just now but my mobile number is in the middle of porting over. So I’m not getting the text to verify my number.
Will try again at 9am.
I highly doubt that. Even Monzo, if they were to go IPO, have levels of dilution which mean you’d have to have a lot of shares. We’re well past the days of folk making big bucks out of “silicon valley startups” etc.
Sounds interesting overall but I think as with all of these “eco bank startups” (Tred/Algbra/These) the same issue exists which is there isn’t really a USP and once the VC money goes so do they. Or they “convert” to Business to Business and go bust anyway.
I give them six months.
Must be putting a few through today because I was 90ish over Christmas and I got my code this morning. UI seems realy good, now it’s just down to features and how soon they implement them.
To be honest, the ‘Community Shares’ approach they’re taking is actually the feature I most dislike and would put me off using them ‘seriously’.
They pyramid scheme nature of earning extra shares by referring friends and family - terrible idea
The stated up front ‘you’ll get a pay out if/when we IPO’ - terrible statement.
If I were coming up with a concept of community shares for a bank how I’d do it would be:
Earn extra shares based on your own usage.
Pay in £1500 per month, get x shares.
Use your debit card per month a certain number of times, get y shares
If/when they launch Apple/Google Pay - add your card to your mobile wallet, get z shares
If they had other accounts - like a fixed term savings account, then open up one of those, get more shares etc.
Then - reward your customers similar to Nationwide with its members. So, if you make a profit (which, let’s be honest, is years and years away) then you get a share of that based on your holdings. It may only be £20, but it’s still nice to have.
The referral and IPO approach screams just ‘we want to inflate our user numbers massively so that we look more tempting to be bought out and we have no long term plan for this company’.
It’ll be interesting if @richtheo is still hanging around and looking for feedback as a founder of Zero…
I say Sky, I have enough green cards from Starling, if I didn’t I would say Land.
