Setting a new standard with Monzo

We’re joining forces with Monzo to help more people make fast and low-cost international payments, straight from their Monzo app.

For over 7 years, we’ve been campaigning for transparency on the hidden costs in exchange rates, and working hard to take the pain out of international transfers. Our customers’ word-of-mouth recommendations have let us serve over 3m customers and save people over £2m a day.

The reality though is that most of the world's money transfers are still done through incumbent banks. That means inflated exchange rates and a slow, untransparent customer experience. So it’s exciting and humbling to see the signs that what we’ve started is becoming a new standard for transparency, and a solution for the banking industry itself.

Monzo has chosen TransferWise because it lets them deliver a great international transfer experience, with very low costs and fully transparent pricing for their customers. Take a look at the table below and you can see that with just a few weeks of development effort using the TransferWise API, they’ve instantly topped the comparison table on price — not to mention transparency and speed — against banks who’ve been at this for hundreds of years.

Overnight, Monzo has become 2% cheaper than its next bank competitor for sending money abroad.

Incumbent banks are slowly starting to move on transparency. The second largest French bank, BPCE, has chosen TransferWise for exactly the same reasons as Monzo, despite already having an existing solution. With more banks offering a better service in this space, it makes it less possible for others to keep offering a poor experience.

Bank partnerships help deliver another level of convenience to the customer experience. And with most people still turning to their bank for international transfers it lets us bring our service to more people.

Monzo is the first step towards a new standard of international banking in the UK, just as BPCE is in France, LHV is in Estonia, and N26 is in Germany. That’s millions more customers getting the banking experience they hoped for but never expected. Together we’re setting a new standard, and we look forward to welcoming more banks on board.