<story><title>Monzo, a U.K. challenger bank, raises £85M Series E</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/30/monzocorn/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grey-area</author><text>You mean they recently stopped you using a debit card to pay money into your bank account? Why would you do that? If you want to move money between banks you can do so instantly with faster payments.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t say that to be facetious, I think there&amp;#x27;s a difference of perspective here which is only going to widen if you think they are a prepaid card. They set out to make a bank, and started with prepaid cards, but that was never the end goal, it was just a way to test out the UI before getting a banking license, so expecting people to pay money in as you would to any other bank account makes perfect sense. This is not a prepaid card you load up, it&amp;#x27;s a bank account, and they don&amp;#x27;t want users to think of it as a prepaid card.&lt;p&gt;So I think their user satisfaction for people who want a bank account is doing well - as evidenced by their new customer growth. Can&amp;#x27;t wait to see them launch in the US market as it is also ripe for disruption and I think they have the scale and ambition to do well there.</text></item><item><author>gadders</author><text>You can tell they are starting to optimise for revenue rather than user satisfaction, though. They recently prevented you from loading your Monzo card via another debit card.</text></item><item><author>Sholmesy</author><text>Monzo is awesome; they deserve all their success. They have single handedly forced banks to compete on UX, though Monzo still wins by a significant margin.&lt;p&gt;Huge stat from the article;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; And in terms of customer growth, extrapolating stats from a recent Nationwide annual report (PDF link), the challenger bank says it now accounts for 15 percent of all new bank accounts opened each month in the U.K&lt;p&gt;Is this accurate? 15% of bank accounts opened in the UK each month are for Monzo? That&amp;#x27;s an insane stat.&lt;p&gt;No affiliation, just a happy Monzo Beta user.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>raesene9</author><text>I think the comment was around reduced usuability.  It used to be if you wanted to move money into a Monzo account, you could do in all in-app, via a linked debit card.&lt;p&gt;This provided a nice usuable way to get money into the account from a &amp;quot;legacy&amp;quot; bank that doesn&amp;#x27;t have a good mobile story.&lt;p&gt;Now if you have Monzo + a legacy account (as many do) you have to go log-in to the legacy account to move money to Monzo.&lt;p&gt;Ofc once you go &amp;quot;full monzo&amp;quot; that&amp;#x27;s not a problem any more but it&amp;#x27;s still early days for that and Monzo have had enough service glitches to make people a little nervous of committing to having it as their only account, I think.</text></comment>
<story><title>Monzo, a U.K. challenger bank, raises £85M Series E</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/30/monzocorn/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>grey-area</author><text>You mean they recently stopped you using a debit card to pay money into your bank account? Why would you do that? If you want to move money between banks you can do so instantly with faster payments.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t say that to be facetious, I think there&amp;#x27;s a difference of perspective here which is only going to widen if you think they are a prepaid card. They set out to make a bank, and started with prepaid cards, but that was never the end goal, it was just a way to test out the UI before getting a banking license, so expecting people to pay money in as you would to any other bank account makes perfect sense. This is not a prepaid card you load up, it&amp;#x27;s a bank account, and they don&amp;#x27;t want users to think of it as a prepaid card.&lt;p&gt;So I think their user satisfaction for people who want a bank account is doing well - as evidenced by their new customer growth. Can&amp;#x27;t wait to see them launch in the US market as it is also ripe for disruption and I think they have the scale and ambition to do well there.</text></item><item><author>gadders</author><text>You can tell they are starting to optimise for revenue rather than user satisfaction, though. They recently prevented you from loading your Monzo card via another debit card.</text></item><item><author>Sholmesy</author><text>Monzo is awesome; they deserve all their success. They have single handedly forced banks to compete on UX, though Monzo still wins by a significant margin.&lt;p&gt;Huge stat from the article;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; And in terms of customer growth, extrapolating stats from a recent Nationwide annual report (PDF link), the challenger bank says it now accounts for 15 percent of all new bank accounts opened each month in the U.K&lt;p&gt;Is this accurate? 15% of bank accounts opened in the UK each month are for Monzo? That&amp;#x27;s an insane stat.&lt;p&gt;No affiliation, just a happy Monzo Beta user.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gadders</author><text>I already have a bank account I&amp;#x27;m happy with. I specifically got the Monzo card as a prepaid card to use when spending abroad, which is what they originally sold as one of their key benefits.</text></comment>