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Challenger banks


Rippy

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Anyone following these? Tandem, Atom, Mondo etc.

Couple friends have showed me their Mondo apps and the breakdown of their spending is pretty slick.

"Thanks to being one of the most open in its approach, Mondo’s app is the one we know the most about from a features perspective. There is a real-time breakdown of your spending habits, quick mobile money transfers, integrations with the likes of Transport for London, Uber and fellow fintech company Nutmeg, some AI layering to better predict your banking habits, zero foreign exchange rates and possibly biometrics for security."

Sign up: goo.gl/dzpnYp

40k waiting list but you get bumped up 4k for every invite -_-

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Sorry, should've linked relevant articles.

They're banks that provide mobile only banking services, aiming to make the banking experience more personalised and more intelligent. There's a lot these startups around but only a handful have banking licenses at the moment. In fact I think only Atom and Tandem have one.

http://thenextweb.com/apps/2016/02/15/mondo-gives-you-a-smarter-debit-card-and-could-one-day-replace-your-bank/#gref

 

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Building a bank

Mondo is currently an incredibly useful spending tracker, but CEO Tom Blomfield has ambitious plans to make his app the center of your financial life. While it plans to be able to offer fully-regulated bank accounts with sort codes and account numbers by the end of the year, Mondo won’t be directly getting into other areas of financial services, like loans. Instead, Blomfield sees the app as an ideal marketplace for others to offer those products to users.

Blomfield is a seasoned fintech entrepreneur. He previously co-founded successful B2B direct debit processing startup GoCardless, but Mondo represents his attempt to build something his family and friends can use and relate to. He wants it to be one of the few, highly useful apps people allow onto the homescreen of their phone and open every day. I’ve certainly kept a closer eye on my spending since I started using Mondo, simply because it’s so easy to do.

The frustrations of traditional banking were an inspiration to the startup’s founders. Silly things like going abroad only to find your card blocked and having to phone back to your home country and go through a lengthy security process just to be able to use an ATM.

Mondo wants to start afresh and approach these situations from a 21st century native perspective. That’s not to say it won’t take security seriously – it just wants to make things as easy as possible for the user.

Mondo is far from the only company building a simpler future for banking. BBVA-owned Simple was an early mover in the US, and European contenders include Berlin’s Number26, which is already live in a number of countries (not including the UK) and offers a very similar service. However, while Number26 works as a layer on top of partner banks, Mondo is going to be a ‘full-stack’ bank in its own right, with its own license and back-end technology.

Still, even as a bank built from scratch, Mondo isn’t quite as ambitious as CNET-founder Halsey Minor’s currency-agnostic, ‘cloud-based bank’ Uphold. You can read more about that in our profile of Minor.

Mondo company raised a £2 million ($2.9 million) seed round from Passion Capital last summer and is now raising additional funds to develop its product via a new £6 million ($8.6 million) round also led by Passion Capital. £1 million ($1.4 million) of that amount will be raised on equity-based crowdfunding site Crowdcube.

The campaign launches in two weeks, on March 1, although there’s a pre-registration page for those who want to put money in a day earlier, on February 29.

If you’re based in the UK and are interested in trying Mondo without participating in the crowdfunding campaign, you’ll need to sign up to the wait list on its website, or wait for the full launch which is anticipated to occur towards the end of this year.

 

 

techcrunch.com/2016/03/17/open-for-spending/

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Mondo, the yet-to-launch U.K. banking startup that is creating quite a lot of buzz amongst the London tech scene and beyond, is opening its Beta to the public today — albeit one limited in functionality while the company seeks a full banking license.

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Paying for lunch at my local hangout, The Banc Brasserie in Tottenham.

As it stands, Mondo offers a pre-paid MasterCard and a rather nifty iPhone app that features the ability to track your spending in realtime, view geolocation-marked transactions on a map, view spending by category, and get a graphical timeline of your overall expenditure. There’s also the option to send other Mondo members money (ie peer-to-peer payments).

From today, anyone who downloads the Mondo iPhone app from the App Store can sign up and see their place in the queue, while I’m told that the startup will begin sending out 1,000 cards to people at the front of its 52,000-strong waiting list by the end of this week, with many thousands more being issued over the next few weeks.

“I feel like we’ve delivered about 20% of the functionality we’ll offer when we’re a full bank,” Mondo co-founder Tom Blomfield tells me. “We’re targeting people who want to get involved early to help build the kind of bank that they’d be proud to call their own. At this stage, you’re joining a mission to improve the state of banking”.

Mondo also recently bolstered its funding in anticipation of attaining regulatory approval as a fully fledged bank, which I gather is hopefully on track for later this Summer. Passion Capital followed on with a further £5 million last month, adding to the £2 million already invested by the London VC, and an additional £1 million was recently raised via equity crowdfunding.

“At the same time, we’re planning to rollout in other European countries, integrate Apple Pay and implement tonnes more useful features like bill splitting,” adds Blomfield.

Part of the reason why Mondo is garnering so much buzz — aside from noisy tweeting from investor Eileen Burbidge and other users, like myself, who got into the Beta early — is that the startup has already held several well-attended hackathons. That’s because Mondo has an open API from the get-go, part of a wider differentiator that’s seeing it build a “full-stack” bank with its own in-house banking tech in order to offer features that legacy banks struggle with as they are reliant on outdated software and infrastructure.

“We’ve had hundreds of people attend our hackathons and they’re now some of our biggest supporters. It’s also great for recruitment!” Blomfield says. “Some of the most interesting ideas people have been working on are around retailer loyalty. My coffee shop still uses a little piece of card to collect 10 stamps for a free drink. That doesn’t feel like a 21st-century solution to customer loyalty”.

Meanwhile, we count four so-called ‘challenger’ and digital-first banks set to launch in the U.K. this year. In addition to Mondo, there’s Starling (for which Blomfield and co. have history), Atom Bank, and Tandem. The latter two look further ahead, having both already gained the much-coveted banking license.

 

To that end, when I ask Blomfield how Mondo plans to compete with other banking upstarts, he doesn’t hold any punches. “I think some of the other challengers are using ‘mobile’ as a ‘low-cost channel’ to acquire customers and sell them a pretty traditional range of banking products. It’s First Direct for the iPhone,” he says.

“Mondo is trying to build a ‘home screen app’ that helps you live your life. We do that by providing a current account, debit card and overdraft. We then link into all of the other parts of life that impact your finances. If you forget to tap-out on the tube, we can automatically go and get you a refund. If you shop in Sainsburys or Tesco, we can automatically accumulate and redeem Nectar or Clubcard points. If you bought dinner for friends last night, we can automatically help you split the bill and remind people to pay you. If you’re saving for a holiday or wedding, we can send you little “nudges” to make it effortless."

 

 

 

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Signed up to Mondo but they were handing out accounts in personal and needed to be in london

 

Atom is iOS only so no point me even bothering 

Won't bother with the others too many hoops to jump through even with them 2.

Applied to beta test plutus (plutus.it) which an android contact less bit coin app, which is the closest to these I can get on Android 

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I've just finished working for one of the popular ones in Europe and it seems like they're really needed in Europe, and offer a much better experience (web/mobile) than the bigger firms, the main issue is that they don't have the power to offer interest/cashback that UK banks do (ie I'd do way better to leave my money in my Santander/TSB/Lloyds accounts than I would in one of these startup current accounts that give me 0 interest).

free withdrawals worldwide + mastercard exchange rate is the shiznit though

also getting a push notification with every purchase is a real nice feature

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1 hour ago, Cole Des said:

How are they for international transfers?

I wouldn't imagine Lloyds offer that great an interest rate for it to be a sticking point plus you could always hold both types of account.

 

no one will beat people dedicated for international transfer, just sign up for Transferwise and you'll probably get the best deal - they give you the real exchange rate then add an exact fee on top - check out the preview https://transferwise.com/

if you PM me your email I'll send you a referral that will let you send your first transfer up to £500 fee-free

 

 

Lloyds give me 4% in my current account, TSB give me 5%, Santander give me 3% plus cashback on bills, Tesco give me 3%, First Direct savings gives me 6%

None of these new banks will give you interest, they're just nicer to look at on your phone and maybe give you a better deal abroad

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8 hours ago, Platinum50 said:

Waiting on mondo. Been watching the fintech industry for a while, interesting stuff 

Mad interesting, you checked out nutmeg?

 

It's some kinda roboinvestment service, you choose your level of risk and it automatically creates an investment portfolio for you

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On 17/04/2016 at 10:11 PM, QPR Dee said:

Mad interesting, you checked out nutmeg?

 

It's some kinda roboinvestment service, you choose your level of risk and it automatically creates an investment portfolio for you

I saw this the other day, sick idea.

I wonder how all these new online banks helps money laundering lol

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So a lot of these new banks will be hosted by existing banks that have their own anti-money-laundering monitoring systems. They all have to be in line with existing banking regulations set by the nations they operate in and by Mastercard/Visa/etc

At my one we had people developing smart algorithms to detect suspicious behaviour too that managed to flag a lot of people better than our base-bank.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 24/04/2016 at 2:13 AM, dub said:

At my one we had people developing smart algorithms to detect suspicious behaviour too that managed to flag a lot of people better than our base-bank.

What kind of behaviour could it detect better than the base bank if you can divulge a bit?

What work was you doing for them?

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Data science innit, so if you have someone's data and then they get reported as fraudulent, then you have new data to work with to predict future fraudulent behaviour from other people. I guess if you don't have the same models as the base banks then your ability to think of things that they haven't thought of will be increased. Plus these challenger banks are meant to be way more accessible than normal banks - not a ton of bureaucracy like some (note: UK is exceptionally easy compared to the rest of Europe it seems, so its not easy to imagine) - then that makes it easier for fraudulent behaviour to arise in ways that existing banks haven't predicted.

I was part of the mobile app dev team.

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Alot of these banks are piss easy to open accounts in other people's names for your nefarious purposes providing you have passport scans and bills (which are easily forgeable). They are very LAX on address verification aswell. Some US banks suffer the same problem as they probably feel it's a worthy sacrifice for ease of use and registration

I always thought the brick and mortar banks whereabit  harder to do that because you have to bring in ID physically in the UK .

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I've opened up loads of UK accounts online in the last few years with no ID because I'm on the electoral register / am in the credit system (they usually use Experian).

I remember one of these banks (Mondo maybe) were marketing themselves as "refugee-friendly" because as you say they just need to verify ID online and provide an address to send the card to.

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