#still never got anything back on my original rb account either.

[fsheryy]

just realized my mspaintninja account also got deleted. was wondering why my accounts looks off...

[lawyerfail]

Our story: How my mum’s former employer tried to bill grieving widow £5500 for 105 mins work.

I want to share an experience and lesson, so that others can learn, not to go thru the same and maybe save thousands of pounds too.

Our Story

My Dad passed away in Jan 2017.

What you won’t know is that since then, we have been in arguing against the legal system and my mum’s former employer, a solicitor in Scotland who tried to bill a grieving family £5500 for 105 minutes work.

For many people my age, sadly, the number of weddings you attend goes down and is replaced by attending funerals.

I share our experience, in the hope that it you can be informed and save thousands of pounds, from going to lawyers and others who prey on the vulnerable, use and write the law to be on their side, have some frankly disgusting behaviours and unethical practices when people are at their most vulnerable.  

My Dad had a simple estate, three bank accounts, a credit card, a pension and some shares. We knew the balances and looked for legal advice to close it down. In a time of despair, where would you go? As there is only a handful of solicitors in Irvine, and the fact that my mum used to work there it was a simple decision to go there.

Not that we were functioning much logically at the time, but we presented the death certificate and asked to transfer everything to my mum, nothing more needed. No feuding, no ex-wives, no brother, sisters, sons, daughters, cousins staking any claim, no complicated affairs, nothing. As simple as it gets. When my mum worked there, there were an extremely frugal company to say the least. I remember going into the office after school. Very much the typical dinosaur type lawyers, technology wise and frugal beyond belief that resisted change and spending on anything at all.

So, without applying my normal diligent thought process, we signed the terms and conditions to close the estate. People have been dying forever and the legal system has been dealing with it for centuries. Expecting solicitors to charge 2-3 times what you would expect, I naively thought we might get a bill for £500-£1000. So, five months later we did get a bill.

Not for £500 but for £5500.

Let that sink in a little. One, maybe two or max three hours work I estimated, so even for the craziest charge by the 12-minute slot of laziest lawyers. Not £1500, Five thousand five hundred. £5500.

As you can imagine, that came as quite a shock. A big shock.

So naturally, like someone querying a large phone bill, I asked for an itemised break-down.

This was a challenge. A much great challenge than you would think because solicitors don’t want you looking deeply into what they have been doing and spending time on. Despite four months and four requests, I did receive a list of sorts which was not itemised, no running totals and not one that made a lot of sense.

I have a first-class university degree and over twenty years’ experience in business & finance industry. I am a computer & maths geek with accountancy experience and I still couldn’t understand it. It took me 3 weeks to attempt to decipher the charges, match them to who did what when, at what charge and what items related to the costs levied. Even then I could not completely decipher it. Best summation I could do, was that the solicitors had done 105 minutes work and sent 57 pages of letters, for a total of £5500. Various bills and sums to companies I had never heard of, nor details what the amounts were for or why.

Law firms are in a position of trust. A law firm with an audit file and a legal mandate to charge whatever they please because you have signed terms and conditions whilst in bereavement. Law firms operate this way whilst your guard is down, when you are extremely vulnerable and whilst my perception was that my mother’s former employer would may be even do us a favour and look after her after her husband of 50 years has just passed, follow the regulations and acting as per law society regulations. In short, act in your best interest and be someone you can trust.

I know from having some other friends going through similar process of losing parents and that no-one was paying attention to their solicitor, everyone accepting what their lawyer said and months later subsequently charged, this greatly disturbed me. So, when you are at your lowest eb, having lost a parent, not thinking straight, any solicitor can act in your “best interest” and charge you whatever they please. Who else have they taken advantage of in this way?

I followed the Scottish Legal Complaints Commissions guidelines and complained to the firm’s client relations partner. This got us nowhere. The offered to take £1000 of the bill initially, then £1500 but were not interested in sending a fully itemised bill, nor willing to discuss all the points I had raised about overcharging.

For months we had a lot of pressure via phone calls and solicitor letters demanding payment in full but we resisted them anything until the matter was resolved.

We had a lot of family discussions about giving in & just settling it. Who can argue with a law firm? Who has the energy for that? They are geared up and rightly so, to be above reproach and in a position of trust. My Dad has instilled in me a tremendous sense of stubbornness and resilience, my Dad was never one to back down when he believed in something, especially injustice from big companies and authorities. So, I was determined not to back down.

Next step after getting nowhere with the client relations partner, I decided to take this to the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission. This was frustrating and more difficult than you can imagine. It took me two months of phone calls and letters and proving my case for Scottish Legal Complaints commission to accept my case as valid. First time I tried they said it wasn’t a valid complaint. One of those scenarios where you no one was about to accept responsibility, it was no-one’s fault and the whole thing was about to fall apart. To the SLCC it was the Law Society’s fault, then the Law Society saying they didn’t deal with complaints so it almost fell into a black hole.

Eventually, I did manage to get SLCC to accept 9 complaints out of my original list of 11 complaints accepted for further investigation against the firm. Part of this process, to resolve it quickly that is in less than a further fifteen months, you can have a mediation session to resolve the issues before a formal complaint it registered. I accepted this. I met with two lawyers from the firm and one trained mediator.

What was said in mediation is confidential and I cannot repeat exactly what was said, but I can share and want to share publicly the facts of our experience.

 How Solicitors will con money unethically

Communication & Trust

According to many solicitor’s terms and conditions, they publish and share hourly rates of solicitors, para-legals, secretarial / admin rates. They are obliged to publish rates in terms of business. They are obliged to act in best interests of the client. What ours did, is use £195ph solicitor for everything. Solicitors, also do not charge for anything less than 12 minutes. Like it or not, which I do not, but all solicitors charge a unit of work for the most trivial matter. That I cannot change. What I dispute strongly is that if you are handing in a bank statement or a trivial administration matter, that anyone could validate if documents acceptable and you should be charged at minimum admin fees, not £195ph fully trained solicitor.

There were many examples where solicitors have been operating the same way for years, without questioning the purpose or common sense of doing it that way. Three examples we were grossly overcharged for : share price validation, audit fees and letters.

Valuations

My Dad worked for BP fr over 25 years and had shares. We knew the amount of shares held, and in less than a minute on Google anyone can work out the value. Despite that, under the pretence of acting under a clients best interest, ours wrote a letter (1 unit of work & a letter £39+£40.25=£79.25) to Smith & Williamson to request a valuation. Smith & Williamson charged a valuation fee of £60 and then our solicitor, added also 1 unit of £195 ph again read the reply to that letter. £180 to tell you what you already knew. Not something I asked them to do beforehand either but comes under the arguement of they’ve always done it this way and it’s in the loosely described, wide ranging terms and conditions.

Auditor fees

Typical business practice is for another company to audit your work. So, for us, that 105 minutes of work for £5500 also included £400 of auditor fees. For an external law firm, validated that everything in the file represented good value for money, was all in the client interest and an accurate bill. This stinks to me. I would prefer to see a customer panel or external to the legal system truly assess solicitors fees charged. Or every firm to be more transparent itemised billing, in simple English not the obsfucated, obscure and confusing shambles it is now. The auditing firm knew next to nothing about the case. Despite it having more holes than the Titanic.

Letters & Lack of common sense

One of the credit cards my Dad owned was an M&S credit card, which had the princely sum of £66 balance outstanding. Our solicitor spent 1 unit crafting a letter to request the balance, 1 letter sent initially, 1 follow up letter as the first one was not answered in 5 days, then another unit reading the reply and another letter to us to tell us they had received the balance amount from M&S. Again, the absence of logic, common sense and acting in the best interest of the client sorely lacking but our solicitor did expect to charge over £200 for this admin sorry “legal service”.

RBS 4 letters and 1 unit just to confirm we have an account with them, which we knew already and could prove for free. Again, low amount balances and charges that are completely unnecessary and can be done yourself, done for a fraction of the cost. There is never a warning in advance, do you want us to process this, do you want us to write letters and charge you £195ph for something you can do yourself in 2 minutes? No warning to say that you can do things yourself upfront, without incurring completely unnecessary costs, that require zero legal skill and are purely administration or secretarial tasks at best. This theme is repeated for our entire case, there was nothing complex about closing an estate, nothing complex that required top legal advice for more than an hour at best, then for a secretary to carry out the instructions from the solicitor.

Cost Estimates & Explanations before work is done

We were never given any ball park costs, no estimate, no range of expected costs in advance. Solicitors are reluctant to estimating costs upfront. Solicitors hate this, and want to use the terms and conditions, hourly rate maximum billing with no-one watching how long, or how much anything costs. As I have experienced, challenging this is very difficult and even when taken to Legal Complaints Commission, to get a full investigation, solicitors do not like this at all. In every other walk of life, being transparent, held to account is standard practice. When dealing with someone’s estate, trust is paramount in solicitor, it is everything and it should be unquestionable trust.

If you have to have your solicitor do something for you, give them enough work to do in bulk. If you give them five * one-minute tasks spread over five days that will cost 5 units. If you give them all 5 at once and stipulate you expect this will be one unit of work, this will make it easier when reconciling both statements on effort, cost and billable units.

0.5-1% of estate value goes to Solicitor for doing nothing

Valuation of the estate was another bizarre exercise. After being charged over £200 for share valuation which went to a professional firm, the valuation of my parents house was done by me. I have zero residential property skills, zero interest or knowledge in property valuation other than googling house prices in Irvine. I gave an estimated value and this was accepted without question. So the most valuable part of the estate is valued by me? The total value of the estate is essential part of closing down an estate. One of the most unscrupulous pieces of business is that solicitors will also claim 0.5%-1% of the estate for themselves. This is for the sole purpose of them providing escrow, security and trust to distribute the estate. Watch out for this. In estates that are passionately disputed by warring family members I can see why it is needed, for a flat fee, not for a percentage of the estate. This is a disgusting and underhand tactic, which can be thousands of pounds for doing next to nothing.

Now I do not doubt that complex estates that have families in dispute do require legal professsionals, all the same having worked in consulting, having this experience and several other painful experiences with the legal profession, there is a huge amount of money to be made prolonging the problem. Consultants and lawyers take great delight in charging by the unit, making the complex more complex and time consuming.

What’s wrong with the billable hour

You would expect that law firms believe in putting the client first, doing things the right way and having a deeply rooted ethical values which drives all behaviour. The billable unit and billable hour is at great odds with this.

The main problem with the billable hour performance metric is that it specifically rewards and underpins behaviours that can be both to the detriment of the firm and, more importantly, its clients.

Customers do not like the billable hour. It is far to open to abuse. There is little correlation between quality of service and cost as the client still gets charged the same amount whether the solicitor wins or loses. There is more money to be made doing a poor job than a great one.

Rather than engendering a positive relationship with clients, billable hours create an huge debate between parties with both sides analysing, evaluating and auditing the fees. When solicitors only present the audit file after the invoice and have a lack of transparency and hidden charging mechanisms around pricing means that clients never really know how much and for what they will be charged at the end of a project.

Clients know that billable hours are inflationary because they will be charged for a block of unit time whether or not they use the whole block. This inevitably leads to a negative perception.

What’s more, the fear of being charged a significant amount for simply contacting your lawyer means there is little incentive for regular communication. The clients can be reluctant to call the lawyer and equally they can become cynical or suspicious every time the lawyer contacts them.

Within the firm, billable hours drive inefficiency. To generate more revenue for the firm, somewhat counter-intuitively, individuals seem to be rewarded for prolonging litigation, ‘churning the bill’ and creating unnecessary work.

  Law Society Admits it needs reform and is out of touch

BBC News on Law Society

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-42860598

The professional body for Scotland's solicitors has called for wide-ranging reforms to the way legal services are regulated.

The Law Society of Scotland claims the current regulatory framework is "in drastic need of modernisation" and is "no longer fit for purpose".

It has put forward 11 recommendations for change to an independent review of legal services regulation.

They include overhauling the legal complaints system.

The organisation argues the current system is "complex and confusing”

  Scottish Legal Complaints Commission

I wholeheartedly agree it is complex and confusing. We settled our complaint early. From my Dad’s passing it took fifteen months to get to SLCC, thru mediation and our complaints accepted.

It would have taken another eight to fourteen more months for the complaints to be investigated.

We accepted a settlement at 50% of original cost, still was almost £3000 to be paid more for the fact to get rid of the energy taken up arguing against the legal system. I vehemently agree we would have won our case against the firm and maybe even entitled to compensation. But we didn’t have the energy for that.

They admitted every complaint, they admitted they could do better and it was eye opening experience for them. They are dinosaurs and not operating in the real world, they are not alone but operating in a bygone era of charging whatever they like, regulated by legal firms doing the exact same billable hour practice which maximises their revenue at the disgust of the customer.  

My mum wanted an end to the fighting. 

This was my email to SLCC explaining our decision

Following a lot of family discussion after the mediation session, we have decided to end the complaint process at this stage. This decision has not been taken lightly, but mainly due to my mother's health, the emotional strain, stress has gone on long enough and the thought of another 8-14 months of time to conclude the complaint, is far too much to bear.

 Make no mistake, or be under no illusion, this absolves the firm of nothing. They accepted and admitted being culpable for 9 complaints registered, and I have no doubt whatsoever if it were not for such a protracted process to resolve things, they would be found guilty of all matters raised against them.

 Having witnessed face to face how out of touch law firms are with reality, how damaging bereavement is, having to deal with solicitors’ incompetence, how open to abuse solicitors have in billing to people that are grieving, then also go thru another 15 months of intimidation from this process, completely disgusts me. People are completely broken during this process, have no energy to face life, never mind be proving that a law firm and its processes are completely wrong and out of touch, is something that needs to change. As a professional I charge for my expertise, so will not be telling the firm how to improve their business practices but I will be informing the public how they can avoid untrustworthy, out of touch companies who try to extort and pressure widowers and families out of large sums of money, hiding behind a process which even the law society says is broken.

  Time for Change

It is time to change this behaviour, process and practice. 

Solicitors overcharging and exploiting bereaved clients, still grieving and without the energy to fight the legal system absolutely disgusts me.

I want my experience to be shared, as I know several other people and friends of friends recently going thru the same experience, with no idea how much their bill will be and what they are being charged for.

If I can help anyone, let me know. I hope this will be of use to people and save you thousands of pounds.

I hope the SLCC change the process for legal complaints.

Please share this blog with friends that are going thru a terrible time in the hope you can save thousands of pounds going into the wrong hands.

[gta-5-cheats]

Fintech friends: Monzo partners with TransferWise for international payments

New Post has been published on http://secondcovers.com/fintech-friends-monzo-partners-with-transferwise-for-international-payments/

Fintech friends: Monzo partners with TransferWise for international payments

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“So what’s going on here then?” I ask. “Two good friends just got even better [friends],” replies TransferWise co-founder Kristo Käärmann laughing, while Monzo co-founder Tom Blomfield, who is also on the video call, smiles approvingly. “Sorry for spoiling your news,” I tell the pair, who I’m interviewing ahead of an announcement today that the two companies are working together.

The partnership, which TechCrunch outed nearly three weeks ago, will see TransferWise power international payments for the U.K. challenger bank’s 750,000 customers. It is the second new bank partnership that the fintech unicorn has unveiled this month, after announcing that it has begun working with France’s second largest bank BPCE Groupe.

TransferWise also powers international money transfer for Germany’s N26, and Estonia’s LHV. However, a previously announced partnership with the U.K.’s Starling Bank never materialised and has since been disbanded.

Asked why Monzo has chosen to work with TransferWise, Blomfield reiterates the challenger bank’s goal of becoming a “hub or control centre” for your money. This won’t necessarily all be done by Monzo, he says, “but with partner organisations who plug into this hub”. TransferWise is the first of these.

International payments has also been one of the most requested features by Monzo users since the challenger bank posted a roadmap of things it intends to “fix” over the next three months now that the switch from a pre-paid card to a full current account has been completed.

“I’ve personally been a TransferWise customer for five or six years and the service is amazing,” says Blomfield. “Compared to my old bank, it’s really, really transparent, the fees are really fair, and they’re continually working on bringing fees down and to make transfers more instantaneous. So I can’t think of a better a partner to do foreign transfers with than TransferWise”.

I ask Käärmann how different the conversation is with a challenger bank like Monzo — which arguably has nothing to lose by partnering with TransferWise and will generate affiliate revenue on each transfer — compared with larger incumbent banks who have historically generated fat margins on foreign exchange fees. He says it is similar, and usually centres on the fact that customers are already using TransferWise and that if a bank wants to put those customers first it makes sense to offer TransferWise functionality within its own app.

“When we announced the large French bank, which is clearly an incumbent — a massive incumbent — they were thinking about their customer,” he says. “That maybe does feel a little bit rare for banks to think this way, but they figured that ‘if we are going to do this, then why don’t we do it properly’. They were actually fully driven by their users and thinking about how to get the best user experience”.

The TransferWise functionality will start rolling out to Monzo users as of today and will let them send money from their current accounts to 18 of the most popular currencies, with “more being added in the near future”. The user experience will be near-identical to TransferWise’s own app, and will see transfers happen at claimed ‘mid-market’ rates in addition to TransferWise’s low and transparent fee. This means you’re told upfront exactly how much you’ll pay in fees and the amount you’ll receive in the exchanged currency.

The integration is pretty deep, too. Monzo customers who don’t have an existing TransferWise account will have an account automatically created for them when they first initiate an international money transfer. If they already have a TransferWise account, they can use their existing details to authenticate with and link their account to Monzo. This means that any international money transfers made from within Monzo will also show up in your TransferWise account and the TransferWise app.

“One of the coolest things for us, other than just working with cool people, is there’s another bank in the U.K. who is transparent with their international fees,” says Käärmann. “We’re kind of getting to the place where once there is enough banks who are as transparent in their foreign fees as Monzo is then it becomes quite untenable for everyone else to keep hiding their fees and that’s very interesting. Not just for us as companies, but more generally in terms of how banking works”.

Shop On SecondCovers

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One notable dynamic to TransferWise adding another bank partner is that the fintech giant recently launched a banking product of its own. Positioned as a companion to your existing bank account, the TransferWise “Borderless” account and debit card lets you deposit, send and spend money in multiple currencies. Acting like a local country bank account, it is primarily designed to solve the specific problem of earning, receiving and spending money abroad and TransferWise says it is not intended to be a fully fledged bank replacement — at least not yet.

“We’re pretty chilled about it,” says Blomfield when I ask him if TransferWise’s tentative entry into the bank account space was in any way a concern. “Honestly, we are not competing with TransferWise. Both of us are looking at the big high street banks, as either partners or competitors. Our customers come from Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC and RBS. I think anything that increases both of our brand awareness is a really positive thing. We have 750,000 customers, which is something like 2 percent of the adult population, we’re targeting the other 98 percent who are still using the big banks. I just think there is so much headroom in this space that it would be crazy to think that we are competing with each other”.

“If we take a step back, what is the problem we are solving?” says Käärmann rhetorically. “The problem we are solving is that moving money across borders is expensive”. He then reiterates a point that TransferWise co-founder and Chairman Taavet Hinrikus has made often, which is that the company is entirely agnostic on how customers access the service. The more money moving via its infrastructure, the better, with economies of scale also meaning it has been able to lower fees on an increasing number of routes.

“For us, it doesn’t really matter if the money is in a bank account that is connected directly to TransferWise or if it is in the Borderless account,” he says. “There’s really no difference, and I know the user experience is better today if you’re banking in the U.K. with Monzo, so that’s what users should do”.

At this point I can’t resist mentioning Revolut, the digital bank startup and newly crowned unicorn that, on paper at least, competes with both TransferWise and Monzo. Revolut’s original “attack vector” (to borrow Blomfield’s phrase) was cheap foreign currency exchange coupled with a debit card for traveling. And although not yet a licensed bank, it has rolled out bank account features at a shockingly fast pace, putting it on feature parity with Monzo in a number of instances.

Rightly or wrongly, I put it to Käärmann that there is a market perception that Revolut is often the cheapest option when spending or sending money abroad, even if questions remain about how it determines prices, especially at weekends, or if the startup actually makes money on foreign exchange at all.

“When you talk about other people getting into that space, we should be happy if someone figures out how to do parts of it, some routes, better than us or faster than us or cheaper than us,” he says, somewhat diplomatically.

“I wish these things were sustainable as well. We’re super anti-subsidising, just because we think that over the long-term it doesn’t make sense to get some users paying for other users’ transfers or for some routes to pay for other routes. Progress is going to be faster if it’s clean. But, at the end of the day, if there’s a better solution, we actually endeavour to recommend that better solution. It would be nice if that better solution was also transparent and we can confidently say that they’re not just better in the next 5 minutes but that they are going to be better for the next 5 hours when you can put in your transfer. It’s only fair to the consumers — they’re not stupid — that they should go wherever is cheapest, if they need that, or somewhere that is more convenient”.

Cue Monzo’s Blomfield to caution me not to get too caught up in the London fintech echo chamber. “Most people in the U.K. have never heard of Monzo or Revolut or TransferWise,” he says, “and so our mission over the next five years is to take market share off all of the big banks, who I think are gouging their customers on things like foreign exchange. There’s so much open space in front of us because big banks just aren’t able to keep up”.

[endenogatai]

Fintech friends: Monzo partners with TransferWise for international payments

“So what’s going on here then?” I ask. “Two good friends just got even better [friends],” replies TransferWise co-founder Kristo Käärmann laughing, while Monzo co-founder Tom Blomfield, who is also on the video call, smiles approvingly. “Sorry for spoiling your news,” I tell the pair, who I’m interviewing ahead of an announcement today that the two companies are working together.

The partnership, which TechCrunch outed nearly three weeks ago, will see TransferWise power international payments for the U.K. challenger bank’s 750,000 customers. It is the second new bank partnership that the fintech unicorn has unveiled this month, after announcing that it has begun working with France’s second largest bank BPCE Groupe.

TransferWise also powers international money transfer for Germany’s N26, and Estonia’s LHV. However, a previously announced partnership with the U.K.’s Starling Bank never materialised and has since been disbanded.

Asked why Monzo has chosen to work with TransferWise, Blomfield reiterates the challenger bank’s goal of becoming a “hub or control centre” for your money. This won’t necessarily all be done by Monzo, he says, “but with partner organisations who plug into this hub”. TransferWise is the first of these.

International payments has also been one of the most requested features by Monzo users since the challenger bank posted a roadmap of things it intends to “fix” over the next three months now that the switch from a pre-paid card to a full current account has been completed.

“I’ve personally been a TransferWise customer for five or six years and the service is amazing,” says Blomfield. “Compared to my old bank, it’s really, really transparent, the fees are really fair, and they’re continually working on bringing fees down and to make transfers more instantaneous. So I can’t think of a better a partner to do foreign transfers with than TransferWise”.

I ask Käärmann how different the conversation is with a challenger bank like Monzo — which arguably has nothing to lose by partnering with TransferWise and will generate affiliate revenue on each transfer — compared with larger incumbent banks who have historically generated fat margins on foreign exchange fees. He says it is similar, and usually centres on the fact that customers are already using TransferWise and that if a bank wants to put those customers first it makes sense to offer TransferWise functionality within its own app.

“When we announced the large French bank, which is clearly an incumbent — a massive incumbent — they were thinking about their customer,” he says. “That maybe does feel a little bit rare for banks to think this way, but they figured that ‘if we are going to do this, then why don’t we do it properly’. They were actually fully driven by their users and thinking about how to get the best user experience”.

The TransferWise functionality will start rolling out to Monzo users as of today and will let them send money from their current accounts to 18 of the most popular currencies, with “more being added in the near future”. The user experience will be near-identical to TransferWise’s own app, and will see transfers happen at claimed ‘mid-market’ rates in addition to TransferWise’s low and transparent fee. This means you’re told upfront exactly how much you’ll pay in fees and the amount you’ll receive in the exchanged currency.

The integration is pretty deep, too. Monzo customers who don’t have an existing TransferWise account will have an account automatically created for them when they first initiate an international money transfer. If they already have a TransferWise account, they can use their existing details to authenticate with and link their account to Monzo. This means that any international money transfers made from within Monzo will also show up in your TransferWise account and the TransferWise app.

“One of the coolest things for us, other than just working with cool people, is there’s another bank in the U.K. who is transparent with their international fees,” says Käärmann. “We’re kind of getting to the place where once there is enough banks who are as transparent in their foreign fees as Monzo is then it becomes quite untenable for everyone else to keep hiding their fees and that’s very interesting. Not just for us as companies, but more generally in terms of how banking works”.

One notable dynamic to TransferWise adding another bank partner is that the fintech giant recently launched a banking product of its own. Positioned as a companion to your existing bank account, the TransferWise “Borderless” account and debit card lets you deposit, send and spend money in multiple currencies. Acting like a local country bank account, it is primarily designed to solve the specific problem of earning, receiving and spending money abroad and TransferWise says it is not intended to be a fully fledged bank replacement — at least not yet.

“We’re pretty chilled about it,” says Blomfield when I ask him if TransferWise’s tentative entry into the bank account space was in any way a concern. “Honestly, we are not competing with TransferWise. Both of us are looking at the big high street banks, as either partners or competitors. Our customers come from Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC and RBS. I think anything that increases both of our brand awareness is a really positive thing. We have 750,000 customers, which is something like 2 percent of the adult population, we’re targeting the other 98 percent who are still using the big banks. I just think there is so much headroom in this space that it would be crazy to think that we are competing with each other”.

“If we take a step back, what is the problem we are solving?” says Käärmann rhetorically. “The problem we are solving is that moving money across borders is expensive”. He then reiterates a point that TransferWise co-founder and Chairman Taavet Hinrikus has made often, which is that the company is entirely agnostic on how customers access the service. The more money moving via its infrastructure, the better, with economies of scale also meaning it has been able to lower fees on an increasing number of routes.

“For us, it doesn’t really matter if the money is in a bank account that is connected directly to TransferWise or if it is in the Borderless account,” he says. “There’s really no difference, and I know the user experience is better today if you’re banking in the U.K. with Monzo, so that’s what users should do”.

At this point I can’t resist mentioning Revolut, the digital bank startup and newly crowned unicorn that, on paper at least, competes with both TransferWise and Monzo. Revolut’s original “attack vector” (to borrow Blomfield’s phrase) was cheap foreign currency exchange coupled with a debit card for traveling. And although not yet a licensed bank, it has rolled out bank account features at a shockingly fast pace, putting it on feature parity with Monzo in a number of instances.

Rightly or wrongly, I put it to Käärmann that there is a market perception that Revolut is often the cheapest option when spending or sending money abroad, even if questions remain about how it determines prices, especially at weekends, or if the startup actually makes money on foreign exchange at all.

“When you talk about other people getting into that space, we should be happy if someone figures out how to do parts of it, some routes, better than us or faster than us or cheaper than us,” he says, somewhat diplomatically.

“I wish these things were sustainable as well. We’re super anti-subsidising, just because we think that over the long-term it doesn’t make sense to get some users paying for other users’ transfers or for some routes to pay for other routes. Progress is going to be faster if it’s clean. But, at the end of the day, if there’s a better solution, we actually endeavour to recommend that better solution. It would be nice if that better solution was also transparent and we can confidently say that they’re not just better in the next 5 minutes but that they are going to be better for the next 5 hours when you can put in your transfer. It’s only fair to the consumers — they’re not stupid — that they should go wherever is cheapest, if they need that, or somewhere that is more convenient”.

Cue Monzo’s Blomfield to caution me not to get too caught up in the London fintech echo chamber. “Most people in the U.K. have never heard of Monzo or Revolut or TransferWise,” he says, “and so our mission over the next five years is to take market share off all of the big banks, who I think are gouging their customers on things like foreign exchange. There’s so much open space in front of us because big banks just aren’t able to keep up”.

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[theinvinciblenoob]

“So what’s going on here then?” I ask. “Two good friends just got even better [friends],” replies TransferWise co-founder Kristo Käärmann laughing, while Monzo co-founder Tom Blomfield, who is also on the video call, smiles approvingly. “Sorry for spoiling your news,” I tell the pair, who I’m interviewing ahead of an announcement today that the two companies are working together.

The partnership, which TechCrunch outed nearly three weeks ago, will see TransferWise power international payments for the U.K. challenger bank’s 750,000 customers. It is the second new bank partnership that the fintech unicorn has unveiled this month, after announcing that it has begun working with France’s second largest bank BPCE Groupe.

TransferWise also powers international money transfer for Germany’s N26, and Estonia’s LHV. However, a previously announced partnership with the U.K.’s Starling Bank never materialised and has since been disbanded.

Asked why Monzo has chosen to work with TransferWise, Blomfield reiterates the challenger bank’s goal of becoming a “hub or control centre” for your money. This won’t necessarily all be done by Monzo, he says, “but with partner organisations who plug into this hub”. TransferWise is the first of these.

International payments has also been one of the most requested features by Monzo users since the challenger bank posted a roadmap of things it intends to “fix” over the next three months now that the switch from a pre-paid card to a full current account has been completed.

“I’ve personally been a TransferWise customer for five or six years and the service is amazing,” says Blomfield. “Compared to my old bank, it’s really, really transparent, the fees are really fair, and they’re continually working on bringing fees down and to make transfers more instantaneous. So I can’t think of a better a partner to do foreign transfers with than TransferWise”.

I ask Käärmann how different the conversation is with a challenger bank like Monzo — which arguably has nothing to lose by partnering with TransferWise and will generate affiliate revenue on each transfer — compared with larger incumbent banks who have historically generated fat margins on foreign exchange fees. He says it is similar, and usually centres on the fact that customers are already using TransferWise and that if a bank wants to put those customers first it makes sense to offer TransferWise functionality within its own app.

“When we announced the large French bank, which is clearly an incumbent — a massive incumbent — they were thinking about their customer,” he says. “That maybe does feel a little bit rare for banks to think this way, but they figured that ‘if we are going to do this, then why don’t we do it properly’. They were actually fully driven by their users and thinking about how to get the best user experience”.

The TransferWise functionality will start rolling out to Monzo users as of today and will let them send money from their current accounts to 18 of the most popular currencies, with “more being added in the near future”. The user experience will be near-identical to TransferWise’s own app, and will see transfers happen at claimed ‘mid-market’ rates in addition to TransferWise’s low and transparent fee. This means you’re told upfront exactly how much you’ll pay in fees and the amount you’ll receive in the exchanged currency.

The integration is pretty deep, too. Monzo customers who don’t have an existing TransferWise account will have an account automatically created for them when they first initiate an international money transfer. If they already have a TransferWise account, they can use their existing details to authenticate with and link their account to Monzo. This means that any international money transfers made from within Monzo will also show up in your TransferWise account and the TransferWise app.

“One of the coolest things for us, other than just working with cool people, is there’s another bank in the U.K. who is transparent with their international fees,” says Käärmann. “We’re kind of getting to the place where once there is enough banks who are as transparent in their foreign fees as Monzo is then it becomes quite untenable for everyone else to keep hiding their fees and that’s very interesting. Not just for us as companies, but more generally in terms of how banking works”.

One notable dynamic to TransferWise adding another bank partner is that the fintech giant recently launched a banking product of its own. Positioned as a companion to your existing bank account, the TransferWise “Borderless” account and debit card lets you deposit, send and spend money in multiple currencies. Acting like a local country bank account, it is primarily designed to solve the specific problem of earning, receiving and spending money abroad and TransferWise says it is not intended to be a fully fledged bank replacement — at least not yet.

“We’re pretty chilled about it,” says Blomfield when I ask him if TransferWise’s tentative entry into the bank account space was in any way a concern. “Honestly, we are not competing with TransferWise. Both of us are looking at the big high street banks, as either partners or competitors. Our customers come from Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC and RBS. I think anything that increases both of our brand awareness is a really positive thing. We have 750,000 customers, which is something like 2 percent of the adult population, we’re targeting the other 98 percent who are still using the big banks. I just think there is so much headroom in this space that it would be crazy to think that we are competing with each other”.

“If we take a step back, what is the problem we are solving?” says Käärmann rhetorically. “The problem we are solving is that moving money across borders is expensive”. He then reiterates a point that TransferWise co-founder and Chairman Taavet Hinrikus has made often, which is that the company is entirely agnostic on how customers access the service. The more money moving via its infrastructure, the better, with economies of scale also meaning it has been able to lower fees on an increasing number of routes.

“For us, it doesn’t really matter if the money is in a bank account that is connected directly to TransferWise or if it is in the Borderless account,” he says. “There’s really no difference, and I know the user experience is better today if you’re banking in the U.K. with Monzo, so that’s what users should do”.

At this point I can’t resist mentioning Revolut, the digital bank startup and newly crowned unicorn that, on paper at least, competes with both TransferWise and Monzo. Revolut’s original “attack vector” (to borrow Blomfield’s phrase) was cheap foreign currency exchange coupled with a debit card for traveling. And although not yet a licensed bank, it has rolled out bank account features at a shockingly fast pace, putting it on feature parity with Monzo in a number of instances.

Rightly or wrongly, I put it to Käärmann that there is a market perception that Revolut is often the cheapest option when spending or sending money abroad, even if questions remain about how it determines prices, especially at weekends, or if the startup actually makes money on foreign exchange at all.

“When you talk about other people getting into that space, we should be happy if someone figures out how to do parts of it, some routes, better than us or faster than us or cheaper than us,” he says, somewhat diplomatically.

“I wish these things were sustainable as well. We’re super anti-subsidising, just because we think that over the long-term it doesn’t make sense to get some users paying for other users’ transfers or for some routes to pay for other routes. Progress is going to be faster if it’s clean. But, at the end of the day, if there’s a better solution, we actually endeavour to recommend that better solution. It would be nice if that better solution was also transparent and we can confidently say that they’re not just better in the next 5 minutes but that they are going to be better for the next 5 hours when you can put in your transfer. It’s only fair to the consumers — they’re not stupid — that they should go wherever is cheapest, if they need that, or somewhere that is more convenient”.

Cue Monzo’s Blomfield to caution me not to get too caught up in the London fintech echo chamber. “Most people in the U.K. have never heard of Monzo or Revolut or TransferWise,” he says, “and so our mission over the next five years is to take market share off all of the big banks, who I think are gouging their customers on things like foreign exchange. There’s so much open space in front of us because big banks just aren’t able to keep up”.

via TechCrunch