Mondo, an app that's trying to replace brick-and-mortar banks | Hacker News Reader

Mondo, an app that's trying to replace brick-and-mortar banks

thememo.com

This sounds like http://simple.com for the UK. The bit that worried me was

    we plan to make all the money we need from fair and transparent overdraft charges

... which means they have a strong incentive to have their customers overdraft.

Simple's model feels more sustainable:

    Although we love technology, we don’t knock tradition. In the past, banks
    made most of their profits off interest margin—the difference between the
    amount of interest they make on loans, and the interest they pay customers
    on their deposits. Our partner bank splits this interest margin with Simple.

    When you swipe your debit card, the merchant pays a service fee
    (called interchange) to the issuing bank. Our partners split this
    revenue with us.

I've been looking for a europe-based alternative to Simple for months. This is exciting.

Do you use Simple yourself, would you recommend them? I just read that they've seen some significant teething problems:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/10/months-after-its-upgrade-si...

(I might need to open a personal US bank account soon but have no idea where to start. I'd err towards a local credit union, but again, there are so many. Edit: It looks like you have to be a permanent resident of the US to use Simple, so not appropriate for people on temporary visas it seems.)

I do, and I would heartily recommend them. It was a bit annoying during the time period the article describes, but things are smoothed out now.

Not OP but I can answer this. I use Simple and I HIGHLY recommend them. I've not had any of the issues mentioned in that article but had 1-2 friends that use Simple that did have issues (around that upgrade) with deposits not getting posted and/or transactions not being posted misleading them on the true balance of their account. Simple cleared it all up and reimbursed them like $50 for their trouble (on top of not charging overdraft fees in one case). Simple's support is better than anything out there. PERIOD. They get back to you in normally less than 1 hour (if you use their mobile/site chat) and only once did I get what I felt like as a form letter. Most of the time they are very personable (see: https://s.joshstrange.com/ZuVu.png and https://s.joshstrange.com/BbKS.png + https://s.joshstrange.com/glaC.png I've got a few more if you want to see them) and a joy to work with. If you have other questions let me know.

It will be interesting to see if Mondo can overcome the issue Simple had. Originally they wanted to own the full stack and talked about how there would be an API. Years later they abandoned trying to own the stack and settled for being a thin layer on top of existing banks (Bancorp) and the API hasn't been mentioned in forever.

In 2012 I reached out to Simple through support and this was my interaction: https://s.joshstrange.com/ZuVu.png and the email that followed: https://s.joshstrange.com/x1MW.png

There was a little more back and forth on feature suggestions but that's not really relevant to the API so I didn't post it.

So the API is DOA which is sad but I still really do like Simple and their tools. It's by far the best looking bank out there and has been a joy to use.

Disclaimer: I work for Mondo.

I was a big fan (and user) of Simple in the early days - I really admired their vision & UX focus. However, Simple wasn't able to lend because fundamentally they were not a bank - they were a skin on Bancorp (and now BBVA).

If you're relying on card interchange fees or net-interest income ("NII") without any real lending business, it's almost impossible to make the numbers stack up. As a bank, even if you pay close to 0% interest on account balances, you'll only make about 1% investing that money in government gilts, giving a net interest margin ("NIM") of 1%.

So, I get that you want to make the accounts free, but frankly, for the kind of service you're talking about, I would very gladly pay a monthly fee.

I say that a) because I agree that all of the current UK banks suck and I'm willing to vote with my wallet, b) I haven't been overdrawn since my student days, nor do I typically carry any short term debt, thus making me a terrible customer for you, because I wouldn't be generating any revenue (beyond the interchange fees).

Also, if I can throw some feature requests at you:

* I want to annotate my Direct Debits. I have a bunch of them and it's very annoying to keep track of which DD relates to which tangible thing in my life (e.g. all the insurance products I have, which despite having been sold to me by visible brands, are billed directly by underwriters with inscrutable names)

* I absolutely do not want a little two factor device I shove my debit card into, with its pathetic little LCD screen that fails every 6 months. I want my phone to authenticate me with TouchID and/or an APNS/SMS code.

* I want my account visible via an (documented) API, so it integrates cleanly into iBank on my Mac (or similar apps). I currently keep my local archive of account transactions by manually exporting Quicken files from my bank's website.

* I'd like to be allowed to access the account API myself, because maybe I want to write a Mac app that puts my live balance in an NSMenuItem

* Search. Oh my goodness why can I not search my account history for merchant names, dates, or amounts.

* Apply Pay support (duh)

* Cheque deposit via my phone's camera

* Instant setup/teardown of sub-accounts, so I can quickly open a savings pot for a particular thing I want to buy, then delete it when I hit my target

The only one of them that is not doable is the cheque deposit as in the UK the bank needs the physical cheque.

Rumours suggest this is going to change in UK law very soon.

I think you'll like what we're building :-)

Drop us your email at https://getmondo.co.uk and we'll let you know when you can try out the account.

Did anyone else read the title as "one weird trick that's got bankers worried"?

With all respect, the title is click bait and should probably be changed.

Update: It looks like the OP has been flagged (spam?). It moved from position 7 to off the front page, instantly.

Hello, I'm the author and the person who shared the post.

Have I done something wrong to have this marked as spam?

I've written about financial tech startups for the past 5 years and can confirm, banks are worried about these guys as well as Apollo bank which just got a license this week.

> Have I done something wrong to have this marked as spam?

Not really. I don't think the users who flagged this post were being very fair, and we've turned the flags off. In their defense, though, HN does see a lot of posts that look and read a bit like this one and really are spammy. Users here are a bit different from general web readership in that they value information over slogans and want the substantive details of a story. They tend to look down on enthusiastic reporting as PR.

You're welcome to repost it (you'll need to use a slightly different URL to bypass the duplicate detector). Give it a more substantive title, though, and users here will probably react better. Something like the title we changed this post to would be fine, or anything along those lines. Email us at hn@ycombinator.com if you have any questions.

(I'm a moderator of HN.)

Hi Dang,

Thanks so much for getting back to me, I appreciate it.

Have resubmitted and will take on the feedback for future posts.

Posts using link shorteners get killed, so that one didn't go through.

All you need to do is make a tiny tweak to the original URL, such as adding or removing a trailing slash or a query string. The duplicate detector is left porous like this to allow reposts of good articles that haven't had much attention yet.

I didn't flag this. I simply thought the HN title of the OP was click bait and should be changed. I only later updated my comment to note that it appeared to be marked as spam.

Also, FTR, I have upvoted the post.

Disclaimer I did work for an online only bank circa 2000 which shut down several years later.

Most client sill want to see someone on the big life decisions: Mortgage, Investment Asset Allocation, Inheritance etc. The chequing/current account (At least in Canada) is generally used as a loss leader to get those big lucrative items.

Being nimble with a regulator like the FCA, ACPR, OSFI, FED etc is difficult. Guys like Apple who just provide the software can bypass local regulations which is generally a lot easier to scale out and they won't get bogged down with 6 month application processes, Quarterly financial audits, AML Audits, BASEL III., shareholder approvals etc/

That said more competition in banking is good!

FWIW, as a counter-anecdote, every time I have been to see my bank about a big life decision, I have come away feeling that I might as well not have bothered, because they just wanted to push me their most valuable products.

I'd be really keen to try this. I'd love some Mint-style automatic money management (see what I've spent where etc. without too much hassle), but there's no safe way of using a Mint-style website in the UK that I know of, and I haven't got time to export statements as .csv and manually tag each transaction.

The screenshots in the article look exactly on-point. It's amazing to me that existing banks haven't come up with something similar to this themselves. My own bank's app is functional, but only just, and displays no imagination at all.

It's not automatic at all, but I switched from Mint to You Need a Budget (commonly referred to as YNAB) a couple of years ago, and have never looked back. I've found it incredibly useful in managing spending and saving, and very straightfoward once I got the hang of it (they have lots of useful tutorials, too).

I think one of the advantages of YNAB is that it's not automatic - I used Mint for ages, and would tend to forget about it because there's so little work to do. The small amount of effort I put in going through transactions in YNAB each week (it doesn't take more than 10 minutes, and it learns the frequent categorisations) really makes me think about where I'm spending money.

The only work I have to do is downloading transaction data from my bank each week, which is simple, and has the side-effect of encouraging me to minimise the number of accounts I have open, because it makes managing YNAB simpler.

YNAB's not free software, but it is occasionally on sale. Even at full price it's well worth the money, provided that you really want to take control of your spending. It's available on Steam, so you may now be able to get a refund if you don't like it (give it a chance, though - the initial setup is most of the work, ongoing usage is much less).

Thanks for the recommendation, I'll give it a go. I've just downloaded it and a few small details give me pause (non-native UI, inconsistent high DPI resources, okay but not great localisation), but it also looks legitimately useful. Does it learn from past transactions how to assign categories, or do you always have to do that manually?

I think it only auto-suggests categories for an exact match on the transaction details. And you still have to confirm it. This is actually what I want, because (for example) when I go to the Walgreens (a pharmacy) near my work I want to count that against my spending, and when my wife goes to the one near her work it should count against her spending. The only difference that shows up in the transactions from the bank is a number, eg "Walgreens #4567" and "Walgreens #1234". Having figured out which one is which it can now auto-suggest that match. But it won't try to guess what "Walgreens 9999" should be if it hasn't seen that before.

What i think would be truly disruptive is a proper bank for modern businesses.

Something that automates or assists with business banking tasks?

Those screenshots are really really creepy. I suppose that is the modern world though, surveilled and creepy.

This is really interesting, I'll keep an eye out for Mondo in the future. Thanks for sharing the link.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com