Let's look at various banks' total assets, as listed on this random website i found [1], in millions of pounds:

  Monzo                 139.82
  Starling              206.64
  Marks & Spencer      5569.90
  Ulster              11641.00
  Metro               21647.00
  Co-operative        23102.80
  Coutts              34280.00
  Clydesdale          43583.00
  HSBC (retail)      238939.00
  Barclays (retail)  251305.00

On that measure, at least, Metro Bank is a hundred times bigger than either Monzo or Starling. Assets are not the whole story, of course; i'd be interested to see numbers for customers, revenues, and some sort of measurement of payment flow.

But i think the lesson here is that if you live in the London tech bubble, it's easy to think that Monzo are huge. Many of my friends bank with Monzo, and i see plenty of Monzo cards being tapped on the readers at the tube station. But we are not representative of the country at large.

[1] https://thebanks.eu/banks-by-country/United-Kingdom

According to the website, that Monzo stat is two years old. monzo.com shows the current customer count - 3.8 million ie 10% of the adult population of the UK.

According to https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/saving/article-7647253/M... Monzo has over half the challenger bank market share

    Monzo                 139.82

From the same website — N26:

    428.86 mln EUR

This would be a more compelling argument if I lived in London ;-)

I live in the London area, have a Revolut account and am aware of Monzo but have never heard of N26. I agree with the above poster that their advertising cannot have been very good.

Worth noting Revolut do not have a UK banking licence, and your funds with them are not protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS).

They have an EU bank licence and funds are thus protected under the EU-wide protection scheme.

When they came out in 2018 I remember they advertised heavily for a few months. But since then I have not seen any advertising in the last year or so.

Or starling bank for that matter

I'm aware of those two at least, but from people I know, not one had them and basing around that aspect of traction - sure that may well not represent the market, but at least I'm aware of them, unlike this N26.

That's so strange/interesting because pretty much everyone I know in London uses Monzo. Granted, my circle is like "young tech/agency workers in London", but I notice people using it at cafes and stuff all the time.

According to a quick search - Monzo had 3 million customers as of Sept ‘19 [1] vs Metro Bank’s 1.7 million in May ‘19 [2].

[1] https://monzo.com/blog/2019/09/16/three-million

[2] https://www.metrobankonline.co.uk/about-us/press-releases/ne...

Banking is hard; and growing in Banking is hard. Monzo have only recently started advertising [1]; their word of mouth campaign had people sitting in virtual queues over 100k long.

[1] https://www.marketingweek.com/monzo-first-ad-campaign/