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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Sounds very impressive. It'll definitely scale if they can somehow build it with 3 coders.

I would have thought you could start with a bog standard CRUD setup. How many customers are they serving at the moment? How many queries is one customer going to make each day?

What part of a bank are they actually trying to make? Just current accounts? Or multi asset market making? The requirements are quite different.

Also, on the business side, why does the UK market need another bank? It's a totally commodity service. Why would I want to use this bank? Do they offer something better?

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Just current accounts. And yes, the UK does need a new kind of bank. Monzo's USP is that their technology is modern and built from the ground up. For the end user, this means you get push notifications of card transactions instantaneously. You can freeze and unfreeze your card instantaneously. The Monzo app uses your phone's location to determine when you travel to a new country, and doesn't block your card for suspicious activity as a result. It gives you realtime currency conversion for your transactions. The app allows you to budget your money, and categorise where you spend it. And more.

-edit-

Oh and I forgot to add, they offer a complete API, so you or third party developers can build on top of your financial data. No other bank offers this today.

> Oh and I forgot to add, they offer a complete API, so you or third party developers can build on top of your financial data. No other bank offers this today.

this part ain't completely right - all current banking backends on the market offer instant messaging integration, otherwise they wouldn't be bought. it's not straightforward API calls directly in the backend (which some would prefer to not expose directly anyway). a bit of glue code is required but this is how in the moment these systems evolve to conform to ever changing regulations for example. otherwise banks would have to shut down

Publicly accessible API then.

this is not an advantage then, you don't need to be a seasoned architect to see all kinds of potential issues with publicly exposing these APIs, even with proper security. I mean this is the core of every bank, not some application X storing some small subsets of crucial data.

Best and easiest security to achieve and maintain is no public access at all (something like physically separated networks vs authenticated ones)

All banks in the EU will have to offer APIs in 2017 because of PSD2: http://www.out-law.com/en/articles/2015/january/key-features...

The alternative to open APIs is that third parties ask customers for online banking passwords. This practice is significantly less secure than, say, OAuth2 or similar and is generally against a bank's TOS, which makes the customer liable.

I've recently moved home and these are the steps I had to take to change my address with my current bank and Monzo.

My bank: I look on their website which says I can phone up and do it over the phone. I phone up, go through the automated options and then I'm told that actually I have to go into a branch with ID and proof of address because apparently I'm not registered for 'telephone banking' (why?!).

The nearest branch to me is open 9-4.30pm on weekdays and 9-1pm on Saturdays. I generally work at these times so I have to take time out of work to go into a branch, queue for 10 minutes and eventually get it changed.

Monzo: I open a live chat within their app, answer a couple of security questions and the address is changed right away. It took about 5 minutes at most and I could do it while working on other things.

My bank also charge a small fortune for foreign transactions and contactless won't work abroad. Monzo is free and contactless has so far worked fine in 3 different countries.

The UK banking industry is massively behind the times with regards to customer service, facilities and technology. The potential for Monzo is huge if they can pull off what they're trying to achieve.

The banking industry is very conservative because of regulation. Changing identity over live chat just by answering some security questions seems to be quite vulnerable to fraud.

I can also imagine that changing the customers' address without proof of address could violate KYC/AML rules.

So while I agree that banking in the UK can be a pain (although less than in other countries), I think it's mostly due to legal requirements, not bad intention.

With interest rates that low, retail banking is all about cost cutting. They could save a lot more money if you'd never have to visit a branch, but verifying an identity via chat is not easy.

I'm not so sure. My bank would accept an address change over the phone for 'telephone banking' customers, which is no more secure than an in-app chat. Even if they required me to upload proof via the in-app chat, that would still be 100x easier than the process I had to go through with my bank.

Obviously banks have a lot of regulation they have to comply with but I think a lot of it is simply a case of "that's how it's always been" and a lack of competition due to the high barriers to entry.

As a customer of Monzo, the reason I use it currently is because it is the only service offering a sane policy for travel (other than American Express).

It is also the only service with a mobile app that doesn't look and feel like a complete shit show - usually because they are web apps being wrapped in a tiny bit of native chrome.

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