As someone with a Monzo account, but whose main accounts are with Barclays and Nationwide, I find the hype around the "challenger banks" in the UK a bit unexpected. I'm not really sure I understand what they are offering that is so revolutionary. I still think it's great they exist as competition is overdue in the UK banking sector, and I hope they do well.

I find Monzo works well for what I use it for, which is tracking my daily small item spending (getting lunch, buying a coffee etc), while the Barclays and Natwest apps work well for the "grown-up" banking. Between the latter two I have 4 bank accounts, two credit cards and two mortgages, and the apps (combined with Faster Payment's awesome transfer time) make it ridiculously easy to manage my finances.

Monzo app is definitely very nicely done, and there are some neat features, but for my day-to-day banking I have absolutely no issue getting everything done with the Barclays and Nationwide apps. Both could do with a bit of UX work and decluttering, but they are perfectly fine.

Are the rest of the main banks just really awful compared with Barclays and Nationwide?

Agreed.

I have a fancy colored debit card now, which is cool.

Tend to use my HSBC for direct debits and bills, and Monzo for daily life/luxury/fun items.

It just seems like the legacy banks are awful rather than Monzo is breaking boundaries. I have a Chinese bank card and I get opt-in text notifications for my spending and have done for years.

Most UK banks offer apps, Monzo is not doing anything particularly new. Their success has been in convincing investors that the competition is "ossified" whilst dropping tons of their money and failing to actually gather deposits.

You can buy £400bn of deposits with Lloyds for £40bn (and get paid 5%/year for the pleasure). Or you can pay £1bn for a loss-making company with £100m in deposits...it is pretty simple.

Monzo offers push notifications within 5 seconds of card payments. Customers love that feature. Traditional banks don't offer it, probably because none of their batch computer systems can do anything in 5 seconds. That has been the status quo for 5+ years, and I don't see it changing.

Here in the UK Amex do that too: instant push notifications from the Amex app or from Google Pay, even if you used the physical card.

Monzo did offer the novel feature of convenient, temporary, self service card disabling / enabling (useful if you lose it then find it again) but loads of traditional banks have now copied it.

That is nothing special though, just most UK banks are using decades old technology. Five years ago I was living in country where my bank would send me an SMS as soon as I authorised a transaction on the chip&pin machine.

I like Monzo for what they do, but I don't really see why they are considered so valuable. The real value in consumer banking is offering credit, and that's where it starts to get complicated.

...why do I care about push notifications? By "customers love that feature" you mean, you like that feature. Most people aren't interested in having an app at all but the ones that are just want to be able to look at their balance, make payments, and cash cheques.

If I want to see if I have made a payment, I just open the app...which takes 10 seconds instead of a 5 second push notification.

It’s nice for two reasons:

* I get an independent confirmation that money has actually left my account (eg we’ve all shopped on websites when the payment pages crash and you don’t know if something has gone through or not)

* it’s comforting knowing that if for some reason someone else was illegally using your card, you’d be getting instant push notifications about it.

There’s a lot of appeal in a product that lets you signal that you’re taking a different path.

And Slack is just a normal messaging app.

The experience of banking with Monzo is easily 10x the other six major UK banks I’ve used extensively.