Mondo – A “Full Stack” Mobile-First Bank | Hacker News Reader

Mondo – A “Full Stack” Mobile-First Bank

getmondo.co.uk

53 pointstomblomfield23 comments

The small-print:

"We aren’t a bank yet, but we are applying to the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for authorisation to become one"

Edit: But a serious question though about your announcement. Do I really care that you are a "Full Stack" whatever bank? I'm kind of wearied by the use of "Full Stack This", "Full Stack That", this usage just makes me roll my eyes even more.

If this is a way to hit up interest from techies like myself, at least explain what's in your "Stack" and how you're using said technology to differentiate yourself from say Lloyds, RBS, Barclays, First Direct etc.

Mondo CTO here. Good question, thanks. It's "full stack" in the banking industry sense, not the "full stack web developer" sense.

Most challenger banks don't pursue a banking license and have to work with an existing licensed bank. This means they are constrained by their processes and legacy technology (think cobol on mainframes). We don't have those problems because we own the full "stack", from the user interface and the connectivity to the payment schemes all the way down to holding the actual funds with the central bank.

I'd love to see an OSI-style diagram of the banking stack

Jack Gavigan took a shot at a high-level picture a year or two ago - http://jackgavigan.com/2014/04/14/disruptive-bank/

And Microsoft publish a "reference architecture" - http://download.microsoft.com/download/C/5/F/C5FCCA52-1056-4...

Long ago in the late 90s I was an intern in a financial software company. I was told a number of tales and legends, including that one of the major British clearing banks still operated internally in pounds,shillings&pence behind a conversion layer. I wonder how true that was.

It's true, though no-one seems willing to name the offending bank in print.

Example: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5d1b0346-2af8-11dd-a7fc-000077b076...

Hi CTO, are you aware that right now you ask people for their email address, but the page to which the form directs 404's with a picture of a monkey? Not ultra professional when attempting to convince people you are a trustworthy finance business they should give all their money to.

Thanks for the report. We're using a service called Mailchimp (hence the monkey) for mailing list management and their subscription API seems to fail in about 2% of cases.

Would love to hear more details if you can reproduce the issue.

It's mystically working now. Previously it reliably failed.

As I see the CTO and CEO are here, I'll add my questions to the list.

1) As you'll be based in the UK, do you have any plans with account in €?

2) Will you offer competitive (read aggressively competitive) transfer rates in €/£ with other European bank?

3) Will you have a coop state of mind (I'm thinking of The Co-Operative Bank in the UK, or Le Crédit Coopératif in France)?

Thank you for your time.

Good questions, but probably not a level of detail that we can talk about right now. If you register for updates at getmondo.co.uk, we'll certainly keep you posted.

I will, thanks for replying.

I see the cto is in this thread. In what ways are you different than a bank like Simple?

Good question. I recently spend a few hours re-reading Simple's old blog and it was eerie how similar their vision, ideas and energy were!

The main difference is that Simple didn't have a banking license and didn't write the core banking system themselves. They had to work with a legacy bank (Bankcorp) and were constrained by their policies and technology. It sounds like this was rather frustrating. We are building the entire bank, including the core banking system and the regulatory approval. This is what we mean by "full stack". A good example of something we can do better because of this is the signup process. You will be able to sign up from your app and use your new account within a few minutes.

From a product perspective the biggest difference is that they weren't mobile first. But that would have been a bold move five years ago :)

A query - would having a smart phone be necessary in order to use the service?

I understand that it says it lives on the smartphone but would the service still be accessible via the browser?

Most of the functionality will only be available via a smartphone, at least initially.

ok you have may attention ...

- Will you provide a native SDK (Android, iOS) ?

- Lets talk about international banking ... Specifically any current plans to be licensed in Panama?

licensed in Panama

That would make me trust them a hell of a lot less.

Initially we'll offer a RESTful API, but we'll certainly consider native SDKs if there's a need.

Sounds interesting!

Thank you for your reply

a) What is this stack, and what's its approach to security?

b) Do I get a proper API? That would be amazing. (It would also be a security nightmare, I'm sure)

a) We'll be releasing more details over the next few months, but it's basically Go + a mix of relational & distributed databases. The real difference is that we're not just reskinning an existing bank. Security is obviously paramount - but it's much easier to build secure software on 21st century tech than to try to secure systems from 1970s.

b) Yes.

Much needed, but a momentous task (regulatory wise). Good luck guys (I mean it)!

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