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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

I highly recommend Monzo instead :) it is light years ahead of Revolut.

Revolut is the only bank I know of that does free fx conversions, it's a huge feature and money saver for people that have bank accounts in different countries and currencies.

> Revolut is the only bank I know of that does free fx conversions, it's a huge feature and money saver for people that have bank accounts in different countries and currencies.

Try TransferWise borderless.

Transferwise charges 0.5% for fx conversions as far as I know.

pretty sure Revolut actually uses transferwise for fx transfers

edit: my bad, seems like I'm confused with something else but can't figure out what!

Do you have a source? Because they don't.

sorry I'm mistaken with something else but can't remember what!

> sorry I'm mistaken with something else but can't remember what!

Probably N26[1], who use TransferWise for in-app currency exchanges[2][3].

[1] https://www.n26.com/ [2] https://transferwise.com/help/article/2340141/euro-transfers... [3] https://n26.com/en-eu/transferwise

Ditto - I use TransferWise every single month and it's been a really good experience so far.

"Revolut is the only bank I know of that does free fx conversions, it's a huge feature and money saver for people that have bank accounts in different countries"

I am interested in what you mean by "free" - I think you mean that they charge no fee for the currency conversion but what about the conversion rate ? Are you suggesting they give you the current, spot rate with no basis points charged at all ?

I have a Revolut account, a GBP Halifax account, and a EUR N26 account. Twice now I have accidentally topped up my GBP Revolut from the EUR N26 account instead of the GBP Halifax account, and both times I found that transferring the money from the GBP Revolut account to the EUR Revolut 30 seconds later actually made a small profit from my errors.

Yes.

I have Monzo, it's the rate you get when you use Google. Not a made up one to hide fees.

TransferWise charges a small fee even for conversions within their Borderless account.

In the Revolut app, I can convert, for example, EUR>USD>EUR (on a weekday; they tack on an additional 0.5% or so on weekends) and maybe lose a cent in the process.

For what it's worth, Monzo is a Bank, Revolut isn't

Monzo does that.

Monzo is only available to residents of the UK.

I started with Monzo but switched to Revolut, and I can say Monzo is not light years ahead at all.

The people of London will have to disagree with you. Monzo has won the war there.

Sure, but that's one city out of thousands. Revolut is an awesome card for travelling, comissionless exchanges at the interbank rate and is available throughout europe, and it's winning there. Where it counts.

i use transferwise which i trust more to be around in 10 years and not doing anything idiotic with my money and bank account details

any company with roots/ties in the cryptocurrency scene is waving a giant red flag to users, as confirmed by the latest money laundering mess revolut is going through

Strange you trust a middleman more than an a actual first-party tier-1 bank (your Revolut UK account is a Lloyds account).

> Strange you trust a middleman more than an a actual first-party tier-1 bank (your Revolut UK account is a Lloyds account).

No it isn't, the money is just held in a Lloyds or Barclays account. Revolut are not a fully-regulated bank, they're an Electronic Money Institution. The same as TransferWise. If you trust Revolut, you're also trusting a middleman.

They have received a bank license recently so they are in process of becoming a full fledged bank.

They have a European banking licence, but from what I understand, they operate as an "electronic money institution" [1][2] in the UK.

[1] https://blog.revolut.com/how-emoney-companies-are-growing-up...

[2] https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/electronic-money-payment-instit...

Yes. They only got the EU banking license in December. It will take at least 1-2 years before they become a bank. They will start in Estonia and then passport their banking license to other countries, eventually to UK, too. For now they are still using LLoyds bank account to hold all customer money in UK and are electronic money institution.

> They have received a bank license recently so they are in process of becoming a full fledged bank.

Sounds great, and I hope TransferWise go down that route one day too. But it still doesn't mean your Revolut account is the same as a Lloyds one.

Monzo is a real bank

of course i use a real bank for a long term savings and checkings account

i use transferwise for converting money quickly at the market rate plus a small markup rather than the higher fees and longer wait times to wire money across "real" bank accounts, the same thing you can do with revolut. i don't want or need either to replace lloyds, chase, barclays, BOA, etc.

all the things you mentioned Monzo does as well. Except it's not available everywhere in the world, which sucks honestly as I moved to the US :/

That's not a war, that's one battle for one city.

London is one of the huge hub of Europe.

What war? All banks are better than both Monzo and Revolut in almost all aspects. They only reason everyone (myself included) has Monzo and Revolut is because VC are happy to pay my FX fees until I ditch them for the next VC funded app

> All banks are better than both Monzo and Revolut in almost all aspects

You probably have never used Monzo or Revolut then XD or perhaps you work for one of these banks. Hilarious comment though.

Interesting response. Why do you think that?

I am actually using both and I am pretty happy with them, mainly because of their FX rates and stylish colours. On the other hand though, I would never send my salary there and I don't trust that they are not selling my data or that they have the magnitude of security processes Santander or Barclays have in place.

What are the reasons one should get a banking app? I’ve never heard of Revolut or Monzo.

App only. Everything is free. Budgetting. Security. Traveling. Splitting bill or sending money. The reasons are usually infinite.

Yeah, real blessing for travelling it seems - for last 2 years, every time we travel somewhere, we meet somebody (young, from Europe) who has some issues withdrawing money/paying with Revolut. Wasting hours running around town finding which ATM/branch would work with some obscure semi-bank account.

It has its benefits, but travelling around the world currently doesn't seem like one.

Where do you travel? The cards are on the Visa or Mastercard network so I'd expect the majority of ATMs to support Revolut.

south america, asia in these cases (bolivia, argentina, indonesia were the last ones)

Using Revolut and Monzo, I never had problems in South America and Asia (except for a few hickups with Revolut security options in Cancun). I've seen these kind of problems happening NUMEROUS times with plenty of different banks to me and my friends. It is just irresponsible to travel with a single bank card.

I travel quite a lot and I've had a few problems paying with the Revolut card, but not more than with my traditional bank credit cards (for example a few years ago, my card from a normal bank wouldn't work in Qatar, to this day I don't know why).

I have learned on my own skin that travelling with a single card is not a good idea. I always have two (plus some hard cash just in case). But Revolut has became my first choice to pay abroad because it charges no commission when paying with foreign currency (I suppose they make some money by tweaking exchange rates, but so do normal banks, and I have checked in practice that Revolut is much cheaper). So even if it's not perfect, I would say travelling around is and advantage.

By the way, what I don't understand about Revolut is why they never charged me the tips I paid when I was in New Orleans last summer... they had this weird tipping system at restaurants where you would first pay the raw prices, and then you would write the tip manually on a piece of paper and they were supposed to charge it later on, except they never did.

Completely standard in the US... I am surprised that's legal that they're not charging you for that (since it likely means they're not paying the restaurant that money)

IMHO it doesn't seem legit that they can initiate transaction for X amount, give you a receipt where you can write amount Y, and then charge you for X+Y sometime later.

I really don't want to deal with my bank if by some chance amount Y is not what I wanted.

From my (European) point-of-view this seems completely ridiculous, since here I see the actual amount before I have to swipe/insert the card into the device.

However, I completely agree with you that it's not fair to the restaurant/workers if they don't actually get the tip.

Yes, it's very strange to me too as another European (although I did want to pay the tips and not screw the workers, of course).

Not that I like tipping systems at all, I find them an unnecessary hassle for the customer and detrimental to workers' rights, but if you have to have it I found the system in Canada (at least in Vancouver) much saner: you could key the tip amount into the POS machine when you pay, or directly select a tip percentage and the machine would add the tip for you. Compared to that, having to actually calculate the amount by hand and write it with a pen in the restaurants in New Orleans, blindly trusting that they would eventually charge that amount, looked like... last century.

I have Monzo and Revolut and they do charge you later for tips last time I checked. But it would be great if they couldn't, it's a huge security fail in my opinion.

Checked Monzo again, they have this in american transactions:

> Restaurants in the USA

> Restaurants in the USA are a bit of a special case. The waiter runs your card for the meal's amount and then, after youtip, they cancel the first transaction and charge you again for the meal plus your generous tip.

> REAL TIME

> The problem is that, until the first transaction reverses (10 days later) we don't have a way to tell that the restaurant charged you once or twice.

> Legacy banks will block the initial transaction amount in your account and release it 10 days later, but only the amount + tip will appear in your statement :)

I've been traveling a LOT (from San Francisco to Taiwan) with my Monzo/Revolut and the only problems I had were in Cancun were Revolut's "location-based withdrawal" was detecting the charge to be too far from my phone. I had to disable it to make it work.

Monzo has an emergency web site where you can freeze/unfreeze your card or report stolen. Pretty useful feature if you happen to lose your phone.

The killer feature for both Monzo and Revolut, is that when you use the card to pay for something, the app notifies you immediately. Sometimes it's fast enough that you have confirmation of the transaction before the merchant does.

_edit_ I didn't mean to imply that this was _unique_ to only Monzo and Revolut worldwide. But it is unusual in the UK - it is it is something that regular UK Big banks don't do, or are rushing to catch up with now.

I (think I) have that with an Amex card linked to Apple Pay.

I get the iOS notification instantly when I pay for something with the card, whether in person or online.

Is this something more? (I'm a potential adopter if so)

Talking about Revolut (and I have the Metal package):

1) good fx rate, I think it's google exchange rate with no fees for converting from/to various currencies

2) really easy transactions between friends (makes it really easy to settle up our holiday bills, could have an integration with Splitwise...)

3) almost instant feedback in the app about purchases

4) really nice analytics

5) virtual (unlimited?) cards, each with their own limit: I have a virtual card for my online purchases and my physical card has online purchases disabled

6) despite what others said, I've found the customer support to be all right

7) traveling insurance

8) (don't remember the exact amount) cheap-ish device insurance (eg for my phone)

9) metal card (as in, not a piece of plastic)

10) accounts in a shitload of currencies (used gbp, euro and usd so far)

11) contactless (but well, all cards seem to be like that)

12) (not using this) one can buy crypto coins via the app

My capital one card does that too.

Amex app does this. Instantly.

No it doesn't. Apple Pay can notify you if you've connected the Amex there, but the notification doesn't come from Amex app, at least on iOS.

Edit: It seems the functionality is there, but it doesn't work for Contactless, which is the majority of transactions I've done.

I have both an Amex and a Monzo account, and the Monzo account is far more reliable than the Amex when it comes to instant notification. Yes, both have this feature, but I've found that only Monzo does it 100% reliably.

N26 also does this. Also sometimes faster than the merchant.

VCs paying your FX fees

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