Monzo, Starling, etc

I’m not sure what Monzo is up to lately but it’s clear the iOS app still isn’t one of their priorities. I’ve ended up leaving them because of that (and if you were on their forums you saw how much I was invested in them), looks like I’ve made the right decision.

Seems like one of many reasons to jump ship :joy: surprised there’s not a small transparent fee to maintain or close accounts.

Who are you banking with now? :slight_smile:

Starling. Not perfect either but at least after I manage to get through the initial 3-second load time and Touch ID the rest of the app is pretty good.

What issues do you have with Starling? Aside from not being able to spend my euro balance I’d say they’re doing everything else perfectly fine (for personal customers at least!)

Mandatory Touch ID/passcode, chat is bad (f’ing Zendesk) and requires you to keep the phone awake, asking for the account password (different from Touch ID or the app passcode) for trivial things like deleting a payee or changing their picture.

Other than that the service has been solid (despite GPS) so it’s still good.

This is twice @Rjevski and I have agreed :joy:

Those reasons and that bloody circle thing you have to dismiss before being able to see transactions.

When it came to setting up a joint account, I went with Starling and not Monzo.

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Okay, this sucks

This isn’t correct I’ve never done this - might just be you have an older iPhone and the RAM can’t store everything?

I agree this shouldn’t be there but I don’t do it often enough to find it a major issue

Zendesk chat is more like a call than chat. It’s a synchronous connection to the operator. If you don’t respond quickly they will just close it and they keep nagging you with BS like “let me look into this” or “thanks for waiting” every few minutes (can you not shut up, deal with my problem and only message me when you actually need some information from me?).

It’s basically the worst option among messaging and calling. Proper messaging is where you send a text, forget it and get a response some time later when your problem is resolved. Calling consumes all your attention but the upside is that voice allows you to convey information much more efficiently. But this is a weird mix where you have all the downsides of messaging with the downsides of calling as it consumes your attention completely (gotta respond quickly otherwise they’ll close the chat and you need to start over).

It fills me with rage when I have to interact with such a thing (Deliveroo also uses this crap).

I’m interested now in what Monzo’s doing wrong; I’ve been with them since 2017 and never really used the starling I also made in 2107…

Their small transparent fees could cost you more than your regular bank :slight_smile: and they pretend as if they’re your friend while nickel and diming people

They campaign about the lack of accessibility for people to get bank accounts with the large banks when they accept more methods of KYC proof than Monzo do

They pretend to care about the poor when they don’t care at all.

Oh interesting! I’ve currently not been charged a fee by them yet but I can see some of the double standards they have though…

What makes you say you made the right decision leaving Monzo? Has something happened recently? I’m a bit OOTL

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Same here, I don’t bother with the Monzo forums anymore. What’s this about fees?

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Hello! I’m basically king Monzo disliker so I’ll go through with you @Rosie and @ben about Monzo and their hypocrisy and fees in full.

  1. £1 fee to deposit cash[1]
  2. You require no proof of address - they make this seem very friendly to the unbanked - this simply isn’t true [2]. The unbanked would be much better off with a Barclays account for example as these guys can basically take anything as proof of entitlement to an account[3]
  3. 3% fee over £200 ATM withdrawals abroad - this sucks. Revolut have £200 limit then 2%. Starling have £300 a day limit with 0% markup.
  4. Monzo’s savings pots have a worse rate than going directly to the provider of them
  5. Starling’s goals will allow them charge you for the overdraft you’re using provided that you have money sufficient to cover the overdraft in your goals. This doesn’t apply to Monzo Saving Pots, you still have to £15.50 per month with a £20 overdraft, even if you’re holding £10k in savings.
  6. Monzo’s EAR is worse than Starling’s and actually worse than some of the brick and mortar banks such as FirstDirect and others. For instance, for a £20 overdraft with Monzo for 30 days you will pay £15 (50p a day). With Starling you will pay 23p. With TSB/First Direct you will pay nothing. Nationwide 29p, HSBC 30p, Lloyd’s 30p.[4] What’s even worse is they cap their overdraft to max of £1000 so it physically can’t be cheaper than Starling et al
  7. They’re not as inclusive as they make out. They recently banned a new account I made on their forums for calling out someone heavily implying that they were laundering money (based on them having Russian Roubles). Monzo say they welcome everyone[5]
  8. They’ve for a long time had inconsistencies between iOS/Android
  9. If I recall correctly their customer service isn’t actually full-force 24/7/365 like it needs to be with a bank.

1: More than half of the 2.7 million people who rely mainly on cash have a household income of less than £15,000. They are being increasingly penalised as the best deals for utilities, telecoms and even train tickets are only available online to cardholders, while universal credit will only be transferred to a bank or building society account, without the previous option of cash cheques redeemable at post offices. And whereas before the ban on card surcharges only customers who chose to pay with plastic bore the cost of the transaction, now the poorest and the unbanked have to share the bill. (Source (The Guardian): https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/oct/01/cashless-britain-banks-atms)
2: https://monzo.com/blog/2019/06/12/open-a-uk-bank-account-without-proof-of-address
3: https://www.barclays.co.uk/current-accounts/what-do-i-need-to-open-a-bank-account/
4: https://www.starlingbank.com/current-account/overdraft/
5: https://monzo.com/tone-of-voice/

Edit: Forgot to mention Monzo Plus is actually the worst, least competitive pile of trash packaged account currently in existence. I could get better value myself buying them separately, I believe.

£6 a month, 12 month minimum contract.

You get for that:

A debit card with ‘plus’ written on it

You earn 1.5% interest on up to £4000 account balance - which means you can get it for free. If you have £4000 minimum balance I would suggest it isn’t too bad. You can put that money elsewhere with higher return though so it’s still pretty trashy.

Discounts and offers: At things like Tidal (3 month subscription for free, afterwards £20/month) pretty bad to be honest as the merchants aren’t things people spend at like too often such as Spotify or McDonalds, ASDA, Tesco etc.

A custom Monzo.me username - which used to be given to people for free :slight_smile: note there are no exceptions for people with preferred names (Richard to Dick, perhaps a trans person who is trying to use their new name also isn’t an exception AFAIK) (Inclusive???)

OH BOY YOU CAN ACTUALLY PAY FOR ADDITIONS. OKAY.

So that was the core features. You have to pay £6 a month for that. Anything else has an extra charge!

Travel insurance (£4 a month extra, £48 extra yearly) I’m not reading up on the insurance but I wouldn’t want AXA underwriting it. I’d want someone like Allainz who has a track record of being good.
Travel money (£3 a month extra, £36 extra yearly) so you can withdraw £400 before being subject to your 3% fee rather than just £200.

More are coming, but those will also be monthly fees I believe. No you can’t add these on as you need them and remove them early either - I believe you’d need t ocancel your entire plan and then purchase it again.

So in total you can pay £13 a month for Nationwide’s FlexPlus or £13 a month for this and regret your life to get a better app

This is shocking.

For me it was the quality of their iOS app. Had to reconcile my expenses a couple of months ago and it was painful. Judging by the above posts they still haven’t polished it up - such a shame for a company who was the leader in terms of banking app user experience when they were in beta (you realise how screwed up this sounds where a beta product is better than the final thing?).

I don’t disagree with any of what has been said and this isn’t the busiest of forums, but there are more appropriate places to discuss Fintech banks than on a MVNO forum surely.

Isn’t the whole point of General Chat to discuss non-MVNO-related things?

And yeah, there are “other places” to discuss this, on which I’ve spent countless amounts of time. Ended up deleting my accounts just so I’m don’t get tempted to get back at it again. :joy:

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We miss you :pleading_face: I actually asked Liam where you went :sweat_smile: you were like the only somewhat of a fan with an actual argument that didn’t consist around them being your friend haha

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P.S. I’m not angry in this thread person from an unspecified chat, I pity you :slight_smile: even the high street is giving you a cheaper banking experience and you’re going with Monzo for the coral card :joy: what’s there to be angry about?

P.S. MacGyver sir I was probably on the Monzo forum before you, it wasn’t my first banne !

This depends on which account you have. The FlexPlus and FlexDirect charge the same way as Monzo at 50p per day.