They do indeed - sterling transfers to another UK bank account cost £1 as well.
You wonder if they honestly think people will upgrade to avoid this.
Might be that they want to weed out light users if they’re losing money on them and concentrate on those who use the account essentially full-time. Although it looks expensive to us, I gather that many normal EU accounts have all those kind of charges. Same with N26 who tried charging for things in the UK that we’d expect to get free and that didn’t end well (granted the lack of passporting post Brexit didn’t help either).
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It’s not actually based on Sterling transfer fees, but euro transfer fees. Basically all SEPA transfers should cost the same amount
As a result, countries like Sweden, Denmark and others that don’t use the euro explicitly normally have euro transfer fees but no domestic currency transfer fees as a way to make a bit of cash that they couldn’t to begin with if they were denominated in euro for domestic currency (because no one is willing to pay for transfers in their own currency on a daily basis)
? Like what
Also re/ passporting, that’s just the excuse they gave. It wasn’t a legitimate one, because they knew passporting wasn’t likely to continue when they launched here. Brexit had been confirmed and Government had ruled out Common Market access already
1.7% currency exchange fee for a start, but there were others I think. Overall, it didn’t look like a competitive fintech to me compared to Monzo, Starling, etc.
Well, sort of. It very much depends on the bank. Since Monese’s main user base is in the UK, aligning their terms and conditions with European banks seems a bit misguided, to be honest. There’s always a risk with shutting out the light users, you tank 60% of your customers. I’m not closing the account, but I am unlikely to use it extensively.
Their main client base is not British citizens, probably. I imagine it’s Europeans who would rather bank in their main language and want an easy way to send money home
Also, losing 60% of unprofitable customers sounds like a win honestly. Good customer management, there’s no way to get them to profitability if Monese isn’t the type of product they’re looking for at the offering they’re willing to do
Really - from where have you extracted this vital data ?
I can’t cite it as I read it years ago, but I remember reading an article which stated Monese had a much higher proportion of paid for customers with the demographic being more ex pat. So perhaps they really did want to kill off their freemium customer base. I left them a while ago as I don’t trust their customer support, replies were slow and uninformed in my experience.
I think that was an aspiration at the time, but whilst they are the outlier in charging for transfers other providers offer for free, they are not going to attract much in the way of business, I have to say
I could see expats still going for it. Rather a lot seem to ‘tidyup’ their UK accounts when they leave and then find they can’t reopen them from abroad later. Probably quite a lot of people given the number of Brits who live abroad. There’s also the issue that a number of banks will close your account if you tell them that you’re now living in an EU country i.e. you could find yourself in need of a ‘UK’ account and not be able to open a normal one.
What data? I took the 60% figure you gave. I was guessing it was hyperbole
Also, because Monese offers customer support in Turkish, Romanian, etc etc and offers both a Euro and Sterling card separately ? The app looks nice but there wasn’t really much besides that to be honest
You stated the majority of the customers were expats. I surmised that a large percentage of their customer base were light users. Your view was unsupported by any evidence
I imagine the majority of profitable customers are expats.
No idea about total customer base
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This possibly explains quite a bit.
Indeed. Mind you, a lot of places seem to be able to rustle up the odd few million to keep ticking over for much longer than anybody expects.
Didn’t HSBC take a stake in them ? I thought this was perhaps why they’d introduced charges