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Comment by subjectHarold | Hacker News Reader

Most UK banks offer apps, Monzo is not doing anything particularly new. Their success has been in convincing investors that the competition is "ossified" whilst dropping tons of their money and failing to actually gather deposits.

You can buy £400bn of deposits with Lloyds for £40bn (and get paid 5%/year for the pleasure). Or you can pay £1bn for a loss-making company with £100m in deposits...it is pretty simple.

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Monzo offers push notifications within 5 seconds of card payments. Customers love that feature. Traditional banks don't offer it, probably because none of their batch computer systems can do anything in 5 seconds. That has been the status quo for 5+ years, and I don't see it changing.

That is nothing special though, just most UK banks are using decades old technology. Five years ago I was living in country where my bank would send me an SMS as soon as I authorised a transaction on the chip&pin machine.

I like Monzo for what they do, but I don't really see why they are considered so valuable. The real value in consumer banking is offering credit, and that's where it starts to get complicated.

Here in the UK Amex do that too: instant push notifications from the Amex app or from Google Pay, even if you used the physical card.

Monzo did offer the novel feature of convenient, temporary, self service card disabling / enabling (useful if you lose it then find it again) but loads of traditional banks have now copied it.

...why do I care about push notifications? By "customers love that feature" you mean, you like that feature. Most people aren't interested in having an app at all but the ones that are just want to be able to look at their balance, make payments, and cash cheques.

If I want to see if I have made a payment, I just open the app...which takes 10 seconds instead of a 5 second push notification.

It’s nice for two reasons:

* I get an independent confirmation that money has actually left my account (eg we’ve all shopped on websites when the payment pages crash and you don’t know if something has gone through or not)

* it’s comforting knowing that if for some reason someone else was illegally using your card, you’d be getting instant push notifications about it.

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