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Comment by orf | Hacker News Reader

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.

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