Monzo/Starling Banking/Revolut

String said:
I've transferred a portion of my banking to Starling in order to test the water. All seems pretty good so far, I really like the alerts when direct debits are due or get paid.
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What is there to test? It's a bank. I rarely hear about people 'testing' Barclays or Nationwide etc.. Pretty much any current account from an institution with a UK banking licence (not e-money licence) is going to work as you'd expect a current account to work.

Revolut is another matter. Its licence is from Lithuania. Nothing wrong with that in principle, but Revolut has more customers than the population of Lithuania. There's no mention of how much your deposits are protected up to (or if Lithuania could afford to pay). There is mention of the European Deposit Insurance scheme, but this doesn't even exist yet, and there's no set date for when it will come it if at all.
 
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The people behind Monzo and Starling seem legitimate enough; Anne Boden was COO of Allied Irish before founding Starling. Tom Blomfield founded Go Cardless, then became CTO at Starling before founding Monzo. Both have a UK banking license, so up to £85k is covered under FSCS. The only reservation I have is profitability. Both currently make substantial losses, which is to be expected. But the path to profit relies on people buying in to the idea of one account for everything. Both companies want to manage all of your money for you. Mortgage, loans, savings, insurance, investments, all from a range of third party providers. Only time will tell if this is something people actually want.

For now, neither is likely to go bust as VCs seem quite content to keep taking a punt on it all working out.
 
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I've actually just received some updates on my Bank of Scotland account and they seem to be going toe to toe with Starling and the like. They're adding the ability to get payment alerts, view upcoming payments and so on. Apparently I can add other bank accounts to the BoS app? I have to say, arranging a car loan with BoS via the app was seamless recently and the interest rate was the best out there, I can overpay when I like without penalty.

If BoS can do foreign currency withdrawals like Starling then I wonder if there's a reason to switch?
 
String said:
I've actually just received some updates on my Bank of Scotland account and they seem to be going toe to toe with Starling and the like. They're adding the ability to get payment alerts, view upcoming payments and so on. Apparently I can add other bank accounts to the BoS app? I have to say, arranging a car loan with BoS via the app was seamless recently and the interest rate was the best out there, I can overpay when I like without penalty.

If BoS can do foreign currency withdrawals like Starling then I wonder if there's a reason to switch?
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For me it's a matter of principle. The high street banks claim bailout after bailout, gamble with everyone's money and make us pay for it. They're absolute scum which is why the sooner I can relieve myself of them, the better.
 
Diddums said:
For me it's a matter of principle. The high street banks claim bailout after bailout, gamble with everyone's money and make us pay for it. They're absolute scum which is why the sooner I can relieve myself of them, the better.
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They are all the same. They all take your money and invest (gamble). It’s what banks do. What else are they going to do? Keep it under a mattress?
 
englishpremier said:
Where to? Europe? Revolut is the best for moving money around to different countries. That is what it was designed as from the start. I recently made a large swift transfer to Spain. Mastercard exchange rate and zero fees.
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Morocco had enough of natwest taking their large cuts
 
Revolut is run by an absolute monster.

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Good luck with those upcoming data breaches/service outages when a completely ragged team of developers ships something that isn't working properly...
 
I use Revolut a lot but as a pre-pay card only to move some money around. Even though it now has a Lithuanian banking licence, I wouldn't leave anything in the account for longer than it takes to send.

The Starling Euro account isn't fully active yet. I don't have one and nearly all my spending is in Euros via my main Starling account. They haven't seen fit to invite me for it.
 
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