They seem to know what they're doing at least
I'm a massive fan of these apps though -- I use N26 personally . It works and I like that it's German (savings are guaranteed by German gov)
After a couple of months, they acknowledged the issue and provided me a free new Revolut Visa. It still took about 2 months to get it in my hands, after having sent a couple of messages via Twitter.
What I failed to realise at the time was how exposed I became to the vulnerabilities associated with being cashless. Cash is not just an ancient relic. Cash is an ancient relic and a fundamental component of a free society.
My country has, in practise, become nearly cashless and I used to be proud to be one of the very early adopters of that mindset. Now I lament how hard it is to deal in cash.
I am planning to switch to the only bank left in my country still providing personal cash services. The only one. That should be scary, not relieving.
A new-ish bank like Monzo mentioned above still allows you to withdraw cash like any other bank. You can't yet pay it into the account, but my understanding is that this will be provided pretty soon (based on their public roadmap https://trello.com/c/k2zy6WyU/98-cash-deposits-)
Cash is important, but I don't think it's going away any time soon.
Or pay in cash off course, but that only works if you remembered to go to an ATM first and that ATM had power.
Off course you could also write an IOU to the merchant about the amount of government IOUs that you will withdraw later.
I guess that means that your bank notes are worthless in the moments transaction if they are stored in a bank?
Recently I switched to a new online-only bank called Monzo. It's fully licensed and all accounts are insured up to a certain amount by the UK government. It's great. They're in the top charts for apps in the UK now on the iOS App Store. There's a few other alternatives like Starling Bank and Revolut too.
They're very good. They're open about their tech stack with developer blogs and it's a modern stack which lets them iterate in a quick and agile manner unlike the legacy banks.
You get push notifications on every payment (usually you get the notification before the payment has even processed on the vendor's end!). Tells you exactly how much you've been spending every day.
They've got RESTful JSON APIs you can integrate with if you want to and they also have the option in the app to easily export your data into CSV or Quickbooks format. They even have IFTTT integration.
Really makes you manage your money better.