Also, note that there are already zero ATM fees in the UK, Monzo does £200 of fee-free foreign withdrawals/month in line with the Revolut free account, and cashback is only 1% outside of Europe, if you are paying for the most expensive account. This is kind of what I mean – the offering seems to suffer from the same problems as older banks, in that it kinda looks good on the surface but mostly comes with a bunch of stuff I have zero interest in.

That makes a big difference, and it's not the case in continental Europe. Monzo then seems to be optimized for a single market and a single type of user (who doesn't travel much). I totally understand your case now.

> and don't need virtual cards

Are you using the same physical debit / credit card for all online payments? I don't see how disposable virtual cards is not the best solution for private and secure online transactions at the moment.

Ironically, the only European country where I ever even see some ATMs with fees, at all, is the UK.

Monzo has no surcharge over the network fee for foreign currency transactions, so it’s quite good. However, it’s a debit card, and credit cards still win for reliability when renting cars or buying airplane tickets.

When it comes to virtual cards: it’s a matter of taste. Personally I don’t care a single iota if my card gets defrauded; issue a chargeback, get a new one, done. Not worth giving up for the convenience of auto fill of C.C. in the browser.

At least in my EU country, every bank charges 2% (min. 2.9€) for using any local or foreign ATM that doesn't belong to its own network.

With Monzo, taking out 1000€ from any ATM in continental Europe costs 30€. With Revolut it's 20€. The difference alone buys one a Premium subscription at Revolut.

I don't have any real use-case for virtual cards, since both card provider and service provider still get to track everything. It's possible that it might be valuable to limit the amount that can be charged by a provider, or to allow a virtual card to be independently disabled in case of fraud, but I'm not particularly concerned about those given the ease of reclaiming funds generally.

No. There are fees for withdrawing cash over £200, but not using the card abroad.

If you don't mind using a debit card abroad though, Monzo gives you a good rate, not sure why you'd need to use a credit card.

https://www.revolut.com/introducing-revolut-metal

False. Monzo's ATM fee is 3%, Revolut's 2%. Monzo gives MasterCard's exchange rate, Revolut gives real exchange rate.

If you take out at least 600 EUR / GBP monthly, the Revolut Metal subscription with all the benefits becomes essentially free.

Monzo's approach, if they are to be believed, is to try to make charges cover their costs but be small, fair and simple.

Revolut broke even on monthly bases in December 2017[1], and Monzo was still loosing money in April 2019[2].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-fintech-revolut/fintech-r...

[2] https://metro.co.uk/2019/04/08/monzo-set-100m-funding-despit...

What's your reason for such inaccurate information?

It reported an operating loss for 2017, because it stopped losing money on monthly basis only in December 2017.

What are you talking about? That's gibberish. It lost about £15million in 2017

If a company was losing money for the first 11 months out of 12, that's an expected result.

I dunno what you think you are trying to achieve. Revolut is not profitable

Except the weekend. Gotta read fine prints.

> up to 1% cashback on all card payments.

Except in Europe, its market.

No it doesn't

[1] https://www.revolut.com/introducing-revolut-metal

So you need to spend £15k a month to recoup your monthly fee.

Natwrst have more generous cashback for their bill payments scheme alone.

At least in terms of the population, the EU market is 60% larger than the US, and Europeans are already used to paying for everything with debit cards.

Also, in many EU countries people rarely do chargebacks or expect them to succeed, which makes supporting them much easier.

I'd argue the other side and say the EU isn't a single market when it comes to payment and banking culture. I'd also argue that there are large swathes of Europe that still don't have a card culture.

My personal anecdata on chargebacks corroborates yours, but my own assumption is that the market for a fintech company is much larger in the States than in continental Europe.

To my experience, even the smallest shops in most of Europe accept contactless payments, whereas in the States the smaller ones did not accept card payments for purchases under 2 (or sometimes even 20) dollars. I'd agree that the market for a fintech company in the States is much larger, but this is solely because its current state is so bad.

[0] this is a bigger thing than you'd expect and goes back to my point on culture - unless you want to feel like a tourist standing out, there's plenty of places in Europe still where cash is very definitely implied to be preferred. And don't even try if you're not in a major metro area.

"We can just throw away your money and you have no recourse, trust us with your ~banking~ beyond banking"

Revolut started out as a "prepaid debit card for paying abroad", not as "your main bank acccount", but is closing the gap quickly and should soon switch over its customers to an EU-licensed bank entity.

I find Revolut to be better than Monzo in terms of features and costs, but it's not suitable to be used as the main bank account yet because of the lack of protection.

Bunq also has an impressively good API. Way more things to do than with Monzo or Revolut.

I find Bunq to be pretty unique. The entire product seems to be design by a hacker who loves to think in numbers: "3 beautiful cards of your choice", "25 bunq bank accounts", "10 ATM cash withdrawals per month". Everything is simple and clear, but also a bit overwhelming. I think it's #1 European challenger bank for technically-minded people with no-nonsense attitude, but other mobile-first banks seem to require a bit less mental overhead and are more intuitive to use for an average person.