There is so much variation from company to company within each of those titles that the distinction between them basically doesn't exist. So if you particularly care about the title - apply for jobs with that title.
It's unlikely they will move out of the market which gives them the most recognition as a brand and accounts for a disproportionately high % of their revenue.
Originally I got it because I noticed that seeing the same few sites on the new tab page influences my browsing patterns. I suppose it also works for avoiding messages from Google.
For me, having no physical branches has been ace. When I was with barclays, I could call them up, spend 45 minutes on the phone to someone, only to be told I have to go to a branch to get a statement (or something stupid like that). I'd then walk to a branch, stand in line for 20 minutes, to be told they can't do that at that branch and I'd have to ring up some other number. That sort of thing happened regularly enough (probably twice in my last year) to make me lose trust in the competance of the people I was speaking to.
Monzo having 1 point of contact means they can't push you off onto someone else/a branch/a different phone number etc. And every time I've used the help chat on there I've had me issues resolved rapidly.
When I was in mexico, a restaurants card machine said a payment didn't go through, but my monzo app said it did. So i kept the receipt and did the transaction again. This time their card machine said it worked. I kept the receipt for a week in case the £60 showed back up in my account but it didn't. Within 2 minutes on the chat with monzo, £60 was just put back into my account. No fuss. I guarantee you couldn't pick up a phone/go to a branch with a standard bank and get the money back that quickly
For me the killer feature is foreign currency transactions with no fees at the MasterCard exchange rate, both online and abroad. My "traditional" bank charges me a flat fee and a percentage for any transactions in other currencies.
I don't know what the MasterCard exchange rate is. However, someone recently told me regarding their credit card: "they give me the wholesale exchange rate, which is great". It turned out not to be so great (~1% wide market). It's good not to pay an additional fee/spread on top, but it can still be a poor deal overall.
Google isn’t really an authority. The Google rate could be bad and MasterCard 0.1% worse. They could be from different times. Also, the MasterCard site says indicative only - if I convert the amount back again, MasterCard claims they are giving me free money.
GBPUSD spot is 0.002% wide (so you’d expect to pay ~0.001% for a single, instant transaction up to several million). It’s not actually too difficult to access this through a brokerage.
That said, if you could really get 0.1% from them it’d probably be considered good at retail.
Yep, that's a massive positive that I forgot to mention. In that space they're competing with Revolut rather than the traditional banks. Many people's setup will be traditional bank for everyday banking + Revolut for travel. Monzo can potentially replace both if it gains traction and people trust it enough.
I think calling the app nicer is an understatement. It's lightyears ahead of other banks.
The use abroad is fantastic and it's the reason I originally got their prepaid card. Some UK banks do offer a similar service with no fee and/or low exchange rate, I think Nationwide's clarity card is one but that's a credit card so withdrawing cash is costly (IIRC).
I also like Monzo's saving pots idea but since they apparently can't provide any proper financial statements to go along with them they are pretty useless to me. I really don't understand how that is supposed to work if you need to complete a tax return.
My local bank branch closed down last month. And to be honest it was a frustrating experience of queueing up to talk to someone who sometimes knew less than what I read from the website.
So, considering how trivial it is to switch current account in the UK, I'm looking at it from the other angle - why would I stay with my current old-school bank?
> no option to top up using a credit card from another bank
Can you top up your HSBC account with a credit card from another bank? A Monzo account is just another bank account.
> no physical branches
Is this really a con? Last time I visited a branch (Nationwide), I was told to just go online and fill in the forms. Monzo let you deposit cash and cheques at the post office - my post office has better opening hours, shorter queues, and there are more of them than branches of my specific bank.
> Monzo let you deposit cash and cheques at the post office
Not quite. You can deposit at any PayPoint location (mostly corner shops and the like), not Post Offices [0]. They also charge £1 for each deposit and the maximum deposit is £300. This is not an issue for me (I rarely see or use cash), but it would be for some.
Having made my first deposit at the weekend, the main issue is that the shopkeepers have no idea how to accept a deposit. I tried four places, and only managed to succeed in the end because I instructed the shopkeeper how to do it.
Can you get emergency cash from the Post Office though? Cause I got mugged recently and was able to walk into HSBC and get money out while I waited for a replacement card. I fear if I closed that account and went all-in on Monzo I'd be locked out.
That's a very good point and one I hadn't considered. In this day and age in the UK I'd consider it irresponsible to only have one bank account. The TSB outage is a prime example of what can go wrong and leave you stuck. For me, I keep roughly a months worth of expenses in a high street bank with a card in the drawer, but touch wood I've never had to use it so I don't know how well it works. Before I used Starling (I actually don't use Monzo - but they're comparable for all intents and purposes) I had two bank accounts with different networks and did the same thing there, FWIW.
> Can you top up your HSBC account with a credit card from another bank? A Monzo account is just another bank account.
That's a good point. But with the low exchange rate and a modern app, they're also (willingly or not) competing with Revolut. I can top up a Revolut account with a credit card.
That's also a fair point - the idea of a bank account has been muddied. Monzo had "pots" which all gain interest, and they come from the same account. I'm not aware of any other bank accounts that offer embedded savings accounts.
I do think that comparing a bank account to a prepaid card is a little too much of a stretch thoigh.
Revolut isn't just a prepaid card. What they offer is very similar to Monzo, even if they started out differently. That's why they're competing with each other and it's fair to compare them.
I have to say, I'm actually a little muddied on what revolut is. They claim to be a current account, except they're not fscs protected, but they do have some interesting parallels and additions to a current account.
I wouldn't undervalue the effect of getting a notification every time your account gets used with additional details and the trivial ability to look back over past transactions whenever you want.
I'm constantly surprised by how useful the app is.
That alone has been something that keeps on Monzo. I once had someone try to buy a flight with my card - I immediately got a notification, froze my card to prevent further payments, and had the whole thing resolved within 20 minutes of the first payment. With a conventional account likely the first I’d have known of it was when I tried to make a payment and it was declined, and I’d then have to unpick everything.
I’ll also admit I have on occasions gone through my transaction history the morning after to work out which bar I ended up in.
Massive positive for me. I've never had a good experience going to a physical bank branch (if they're ever even open), and now I'll never have to go again
I recently visited my local branch after shooting myself in the foot when re-installing their app and locking my account.
After waiting a couple of minutes, a lovely lady sorted out my problem with no fuss at all.
I agree, mostly I never need to step foot in a branch but sometimes it helps to be reminded that there are advantages of doing business 'face to face'.
I agree. If a bank has physical branches to fall back on, they can squander the online/phone story. This has happened with another bank I use which has a website with a broken account creation form and phone lines that just die.
For most banks, they might as well not have any branches as I can't get to them at a reasonable opening hour and they have no incentive to change that.
> I agree. If a bank has physical branches to fall back on, they can squander the online/phone story
And meanwhile First Direct has a mediocre website and terrible mobile app experience when compared to the likes of Halifax, TSB, RBS, Barclays, all of which are sub-par compared to the likes of Monzo or Starling as far as the app experience goes.
Then again, Monzo and Starling don't have a desktop experience, so good luck if you wan't to do anything more than just looking at a few transactions on the go.
For credit cards, check Tandem Bank. Worked there until a couple of weeks ago, they do several credit cards including one with 0.5% cashback on all transactions. Plus the usual no fx fees etc.
Over the last day since you wrote this I opened an account with Tandem, had to start a savings account with them even though I wasn't interested in it, applied for the cashback card, got declined despite of a good credit score, and closed my account. The person who I contacted about the account closure was ending his messages with ":D". Just a bad experience overall and I wouldn't recommend it.
I'm curious how requirements are determined at these huge tech companies. Do the programmers have any weight as to which features are implemented, or are requirements typically handed down from someone else? I'm sure this varies from place to place but I'd like to hear your two cents.
Programmers have some say but ultimately it comes from above. The truth is, most programmer would rather add this feature and collect their high salary than rock the boat.
> My disagreement is towards the wording of the part where one may assume a memory is being forever altered or modified and I don’t think that’s how our brains handles storage.
The majority of cognitive neuroscience disagrees with you. Doesn't mean that you're necessarily wrong but you'll need to make some really good points for your argument to be taken seriously.
> The brain doesn't know to overlap memories by some hidden timestamp of oh these both happened at the same time!
It kind of does. Each time you recollect something you change the memory of the event (this is also mentioned in the article). Repeated recollection can have varied effects from (simplified) "I don't recall the original event, I recall the last time I thought of it" all the way up to creating false memories. I think there's been quite a bit of research on how this relates to interrogation techniques and the reliability of eyewitness testimony.
I caused a car accident 25 years ago when I drove through a stop sign and was hit in the side by another car. Other than being rattled quite hard I suffered no ill effects although it totalled both my car and the car that hit me. I'd driven that same route several times over the past year, I had just been in a daze or something on that occassion.
I spent a few days recuperating at home, sore as hell. During that time I replayed the incident several times in my head, and thought I had a clear idea of the stop sign I missed and what it looked like. I went back later, and the intersection was nothing like I had convinced myself I had remembered it being. Specifically I'd convinced myself the stop sign was partially obscured, and it wasn't.
This experience shook me for a long time, and gave me a deep distrust of my own memories. There's a reason why eye witness aren't entirely reliable, I'd experienced it myself.
I think this is because our memories are not videos, we do not store them pixel by pixel, because that would require huge amount of storage space our brains do not have. Instead we use the approach similar to 3d games: remember rough shape of an object as one piece of information, location as second piece, and color or texture as a third. When recalling a memory your brain renders the whole scene, and if some piece of infomation is missing it makes it up on the fly to fill the gap. Then you overwrite your original memory with memory of this most recent rendering.
Any reasons for this? Not knowing too much about the space, I would say the exact opposite - consumer desktop apps are less and less likely to succeed while enterprise and industry-specific ones still have a place.
