Monese account changes for Simple Plan

Banking Personal Banking
1

Some quite drastic

Important update to our Simple plan

Our changes explained

Hi Richard,

From 19 December 2023, we’ll be making some changes to our Simple plan. Because you’re currently on this plan, we wanted to share the details with you.

What’s changing

Our Simple plan fee changes:

  • Outbound payments in your local currency: £1/1€/5 lei per transaction (currently 50 free per month, 20p/20c/1 lei fee after)

  • Sofort top-up fee: 2€ per transaction (currently 200€ free per month, 2% fee after)

  • Virtual card fee: 30p/30c/1.5 lei per card (currently free)

  • Inactive account fee: £1/1€/5 lei per month after 12 months of not using your account and card

  • Payment recall fee: £20/20€/100 lei

  • Card express delivery fee (1-5 days depending on your location): £25/25€/125 lei

Our Simple plan allowance changes:

  • No free allowance for card spending in a foreign currency (currently £2,000/2,000€/10,000 lei free per month)
  • No free ATM allowance (currently £100/100€/500 lei free per month)
  • No free allowance on outbound local payments (currently 50 transactions per month)
  • No free allowance on Sofort top-ups (currently 200€)

You can see the full explanation of these changes here.

We understand that these changes may influence how you use our service, so we’d like to make sure you have the pricing plan that best suits your needs.

Enhancing your experience

To get better value out of your Monese account, you may want to consider upgrading to our Classic or Premium plan.

These plans will still offer a free ATM allowance, a free allowance on foreign card spending, free local payments and more.

Find out more about the benefits of our Classic or Premium plans here.

See our plans

Sticking with Simple?

You can see all of the changes we’re making to our Simple plan in our updated Terms and Conditions and our Fees and Limits. (Our latest Terms and Conditions are currently only available in English, but we’ll have the updated version available in all languages soon)

If you’re ok with these changes, you don’t need to do anything. We’ll automatically update your Simple plan on 19 December 2023 and these changes will apply from that date.

Opting out

If you’d rather not carry on after these changes, you can choose to close your account before they take effect – but we’ll be sorry to see you go! To close your account in your Monese app, head to Account Settings and follow the steps under Close account.

Get in touch

As always, our Support team is here to help. If you have any questions or concerns about these changes, don’t hesitate to reach out to them for advice at [email protected].

Yours,
The Monese team

2

Monzo, or Monese?

Something seems to have gone really wrong in formatting your post too.

3

Has to be Monese, it seems I can edit the post title but I’ll let a moderator get to it

Monzo doesn’t even operate in markets that use Sofort, or Romania where the lei is used

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Didn’t know regular users could do that over here. I’ve gone ahead and changed the title and the tag from Monzo to Monese.

6

I think regulars can, I can do the same on Revolut Community with their leader role

7

On the Monzo community trust level 3 or higher can, but lower and you can’t. I didn’t think we had trust levels here and we were all just essentially discourse level 2 equivalents.

edit: never mind! trust levels are here, they’re just invisible!

https://fintechforum.uk/badges/3/regular

8

Now that is a proper nerfing of a free plan :joy:

Worse than what Curve have coming up. I dropped out of using Monese last year - when I found out their joint accounts don’t even support standing orders…

9

I guess they ran out of the OPM that allows companies to grow without a scalable model

10

Seems to be a few empty images in there. I’ve edited those out for you @riceuten and just cleaned it up a bit. Will need to have another look at that table though :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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11

Way to sink a product. Is there anything you can now do for free?

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12

There seems to be this consensus that if you nuke/effectively destroy the free tier, people will automatically transfer to the paid for tier. It’s never, ever happened. I suppose they try and reassure themselves that free tier customers are costing them money and they are best rid of them in any case.

In terms of what you can do for nothing. I’m not sure whether “Outbound payments in your local currency” means bank transfers or also including payments using a card. If it’s the latter, that really does nix the whole project.

I’ve deleted both my virtual cards (Euro/Sterling) and I never used them, but I am aware Revolut offer them, and specifically, they offer them connected to specific wallets if you so wish. I have one attached to my Revolut BitCoin “wallet” for instance.

“No free allowance for card spending in a foreign currency” - I assume that if you use a Euro card to pay a Euro bill, that should come within your allowance.

“No free allowance on outbound local payments” - again, not sure if this means transfers or card payments. The fee schedule seems to suggest not

“Card replacement (in case of being lost or stolen): £4.95 / €4.95 / 19.95 lei” - that’s pretty cruel

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As far as I can tell, sending EUR to your EUR account, then transferring to your GBP account and back out again will now cost an extra £1 for the transfer out. So it’s still cheaper for EUR>GBP exchange than Starling above very small amounts. I’ve long ago given up using it for anything else anyway…

14

Time to close my Monese account. Seems virtually everything will incur a fee on their Simple plan.

Not worth the effort to work out what (if anything) is still free!

15

Shocking changes to see from a neobank when there are better offerings. They’ve pretty much eviscerated it for casual use. I closed my account and deleted the app when I got this email. I wonder how many people did the same.

16

They never had any casual users that were profitable, probably. lol

To me their USP was multi-language customer support and a focus on foreigners in the UK

17

They used to have an Estonian (EE) IBAN for incoming Euro payments as well. Which was nice. Now you have to pay £10 a year for this functionality to be added. Didn’t HSBC invest in them? I wonder if they are exerting pressure on Monese to make more short term profit?

18

Well, just closed my Monese account as a result of the new T&C/charge structure

19

I went to make a Euro to Euro transfer on Monese yesterday, and it wanted a €1 fee for a SEPA transfer - I thought this was illegal - happy to be corrected

20

They have to charge the same for EU transfers as they do for domestic ones. So if they charge €1 for domestic transfers then they can charge it for international ones too.