Monzo Bank Ltd (English pronunciation: //'m?nz??//), is a digital, mobile-only bank based in the United Kingdom. Originally operating through a mobile app and a prepaid debit card, in April 2017 their UK banking licence restrictions were lifted, enabling them to offer a current account. Monzo was one of the earliest of a number of new app-based challenger banks in the UK.
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History
It was founded as Mondo in 2015 by Tom Blomfield, Jonas Huckestein, Jason Bates, Paul Rippon and Gary Dolman. The team had met whilst working at Starling Bank. In February 2016, Mondo set the record for "quickest crowd-funding campaign in history" when it raised £1m in 96 seconds via the Crowdcube investment platform.
Two weeks prior to the name change, Monzo was granted a restricted banking licence, by the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority and as of April 2017 these restrictions have been lifted. Monzo currently has a number of prepaid debit cards in operation which it has issued to users for testing purposes. These cards will be in use until current accounts are available to all.
On 16 May 2017, Monzo announced that over £250 million had been spent through its prepaid card, between 200,000 customers.
Monzo is registered at Companies House under the legal name 'Monzo Bank Ltd and initially traded as Mondo. On 13 June 2016, a company blog post announced that the "Mondo" trademark had been legally challenged by an undisclosed company with a similar name. As a result, a naming suggestion contest was organised and the new name, "Monzo", was announced on 25 August 2016.
In October 2016, Monzo announced an 'interim' funding round valuing the company at £50M and raised £4.8M in the process led by Passion Capital. This round was followed by a second £2.5 million Crowdcube crowd-funding campaign with the total pledged quickly hitting the target amount.
On 17 July 2017, Monzo announced the current account preview and began inviting eligible customers to sign-up for a preview of the full current account. Initially, customers attended events at the company's offices in London but cards have also been sent out via post. In line with the company's general stance on transparency, the Monzo website includes a live counter showing progress on the rollout.
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Issued cards
Monzo initially issued (with partner company Wirecard) a variety of alpha, beta and investor cards to its customers who want to be early adopters. These are prepaid MasterCards which the user can top-up via bank transfer or an existing debit card. The balance on the card can then be spent via contactless, chip and pin, magnetic stripe or online.
Customers signing up for the current account are issued a Debit MasterCard.
Like all card providers, Monzo enforces a range of limits on ATM withdrawals, top-up amounts, single payments and the overall balance on the card.
Mobile apps
Monzo has released mobile apps for both iOS and Android phones. Payments made with the Monzo cards will trigger push notifications in real-time to phones running the apps, where historical transactions can also be viewed. Users can categorise their transactions, freeze the card (if lost), mark company expenses and view an overview of their spending habits.
Where available, the apps will show a map depicting the location at which the transaction took place, along with the company's logo. Transactions will be auto-categorised based on the company involved in the payment, with data accuracy improved via crowd-sourced suggestions.
A roadmap for Monzo's mobile apps and related services is publicly available to view and vote upon on Trello.
On 29 September 2016, Monzo made the Android app publicly available for anyone in the UK to use. This was preceded by a private beta with consumers who visited the office in-person to collect a card.
Developer tools
Banks in the UK currently offer customers limited or no programmatic access to their financial data. Whilst the UK Government is looking into legislation to require existing banks to comply and adopt standards for secure and open APIs, Monzo has already released a prototype API based on the OAuth standard within a year of the company's founding.
The company has also hosted four hackathons and maintains a "Monzo Developers" Slack channel for developer discussion and support. The API allows developers to view transactions and accounts, receive notifications for events via webhooks and create their own items to appear in the app. The responses are encoded using JSON which allows for data access in any programming language with JSON support.
Limitations
Monzo's pre-paid offering wasn't tied to a traditional bank account and so features such as a current account (and an account number/sort code), overdraft and support for the Faster Payments Service were unavailable. The introduction of the current account in Summer 2017 did away with these limitations and customers are able to perform bank transfers, have their salary paid in, deposit cheques and make use of a full debit MasterCard.
The company has expressed its intention to do away with a number of banking traditions such as physical branches and chequebooks which it regards as obsolete;. Co-founder Tom Blomfield has acknowledged the bank "will not be right for everyone" and described the company's target demographic as those who value convenience and technical innovation.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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