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Comment by overcast | Hacker News Reader

What the heck is Monzo? I read the About, is this another Paypal 20 years later?

It's a prepaid credit card that immediately notifies your phone every time you make a transaction with the amount and location.

It is particularly useful overseas. I was in Belgium at the weekend and all my € spend was immediately translated into £ so I could clearly see how much I was spending. I could also find the café that I went to for breakfast the previous day because it's location is right there in the Monzo app.

The other useful feature is when I'm out drinking. If I loose the card, I can freeze the card from inside the app. Also it means that the next morning I can see how much I spent.

I should add, there is no ongoing charge for this and they use the MasterCard exchange rate which is a better rate than I can get anywhere else.

Ah really? No foreign currency fees?

Damn I'm going to Europe at the weekend too, thought the 2% charge my bank does isn't so bad but I may have to finally get on the Monzo train.

Yep, no foreign currency fees.

Is Monzo only for those based in the United Kingdom?

If so, for those based in the states, you ought to check out Simple (https://www.simple.com) - it's great, it has a clean user interface, there are no fees, and the customer support team is top notch.

I assume it's the same thing (Simple and Monzo). Anyone know of any major differences between them?

I'm also a happy customer of Simple and also similarly curious about any major differences. In fact, it seems like Simple is better in every way at the moment: https://www.simple.com/features

Monzo is UK only at the moment. They don't do saving which it seems Simple does. They (for now) have focussed upon building their tech stack and a pre paid credit card.

The thing is, their big value add is the instant notifications. As far as I can tell from reading their blog, this took a lot of development effort: https://monzo.com/blog/2015/12/15/why-are-foreign-card-payme...

> It's a prepaid credit card that immediately notifies your phone every time you make a transaction with the amount and location.

All of my regular financial accounts (bank, credit cards) can do this. There's typically a page in the account center with settings for sending SMS and email alerts when various types of transactions exceed a certain monetary threshold. I set them all to $0 and get notified of everything as it happens.

Yup and recently all of my credit cards (Amex, Capital One, Citi, Discover) have implemented push notifications for all transactions. No middleman in the way and I get cash back :)

Same here, all of mine do the same. If you add them Apple Pay, you even get notifications added to lock screens. Nice for monitoring usage(which I caught a stolen card number with recently).

That's really good to hear. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case in the UK, at least for my accounts (Barclaycard and Halifax).

I think our banking system is a bit antiquated. Monzo have built a tech stack that is far more advanced than any of our incumbant banks.

The other comments don't mention this, but it's also a new UK bank. They're going through the official approval process right now to be able to offer current accounts, overdrafts and so on.

It's a prepaid credit card with a great app that lets you do things like freezing your card quickly.

They also offer good exchange rates with no fees.

Personally I use it as a travel/buffer card as my main card has been copied in the past and I usually have sub £100 on my Monzo card.

It's currently a prepaid card, but they are in the process of launching a current account. It's a new, digital-first bank.

It's a prepaid debit card that gives you a pretty breakdown of your spending through an app.

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