4 ms·

Monzo is really good but I think it's unfair to characterise the high street banks as dinosaurs that never innovate. They almost all have phone apps that let yo

• therealmarv 9y ago
  It's true they mostly have phone apps. But phone app is not phone app... there is a huge difference for tracking your account actively with instant messages on charges vs. a more or less good web wrapper as I've seen on most bigger banks.
  • Balero 9y ago
    I think this hits the nail on the head. Sure I can send money to who I like from my UK bank, so long as I have their account number and sort code. But I can find people on Venmo if we have mutual friends, there's a social graph underpinning it. Whereas the banks have a legacy paper system underpinning theirs. Again, with things like MoneyDashboard, or Mint you can track your as a series of data object, assign tags etc. In my online statements I can track them as if they were double recorded accounting in a book. The old banks have legacy systems that they are putting new technology on top of. These new banks seem to be having this new technology and thinking as a core part of their process. This is a good thing!
    • nly 9y ago
      Most UK banks support Paym, which lets you send money to someone using just their phone number. This is paid directly into their chosen bank account, not into an intermediate PayPal-esque wallet service (which is what Venmo seems to be). https://paym.co.uk/ https://paym.co.uk/
      • snthd 9y ago
        Only if the recipient is happy to have their name looked up using their mobile number. >When you select or input your contact’s mobile phone number and the amount you want to pay, you will see a confirmation screen which shows the recipient name as registered to the mobile number on the central database. If this is the person you want to pay you can confirm the payment. If it isn’t the person you intended to pay or isn’t someone you recognise you should cancel the payment.
        • nly 9y ago
          In what circumstance do you have someones phone number but not their name? Hopefully only banks/privileged API key holders can look this up
          • walshemj 9y ago
            I am not sure that banks are allowed to do that, I know that reverse lookups are banned in the UK for good reasons and abusing the internal systems of phone companies to do that has severe penalties.
            • hd4 9y ago
              reverse lookups aren't banned in the UK, afaik
          • ajdlinux 9y ago
            You might have someone's phone number but not their full name or legal name.
    • walshemj 9y ago
      And why would I need to do that send money to some one who doesn't have a sort code and b ac number.
  • CalRobert 9y ago
    Seriously. I use the N26 and AIB apps regularly and N26 is vastly superior. I can use it to auth transfers (can't with AIB), choose alerting levels, and it's generally faster and more pleasant to use.
• randomsearch 9y ago
  Disagree. Most of the UK banks are dinosaurs, inhibited by technical debt they were too scared and/or lazy to pay off. I’ve used four established UK banks. Monzo is light years ahead. Simple example: buy round in pub. Monzo: “£10.50 spent at Red Lion in Shoreditch” immediately pops up. Balance is reduced. All other banks I’ve used: <nothing happens for days, as long as a week>. Showing on app after that: “6-Feb CHG A LO SWIN 3868X £10.50” or similar garbage. And if that subsequently takes you overdrawn, well, your fault buddy! Should have tracked every penny you’d spent and run a spreadsheet to make sure you weren’t going overdrawn. Not our fault you’re too busy to itemise your spending, even though there’s absolutely no good reason for you to have been required to do that for decades. The first time I used Monzo, I topped up from my bank’s debit card and bought something from the shop. My phone buzzed as I tapped the card reader and it gave me that magic moment feeling startups are always looking for. Five days later, the top up from my old bank appeared on my internet banking. After a minute, I realised what it was, laughed, and closed the old bank account.
  • mcintyre1994 9y ago
    How is their customer service if you need to phone? I don't think I could go back to a bank without First Direct's phone support - but their back end is just HSBC so slow and jargon statements.
  • blibble 9y ago
    personally I'd much rather have the bank-account-that-receives-my-salary have its transactions processed by prehistoric software running on an ultra-reliable mainframe instead of the latest version of mongodb or cassandra on AWS I will however happily sign up, deposit the bare minimum and thank their VCs for paying the foreign exchange fees for my holiday :)
• snthd 9y ago
  Yes, you can send money, but there's no finesse. Various things to prevent human error, or ease integration/usability just haven't been done. There are no checksums on account numbers to prevent sending money to the wrong place. You can't give someone a unique, bank generated payment reference for a payment you made that they can check against their incoming account, or prove ownership of a payment with some sort of verifiable transaction-specific secret. You can't give someone an electronic invoice to pay (by bank transfer) that binds a unique reference number, amount, and target account into something they can't screw up.