With Simple bank in USA shutting down, a lot of challenger banks-One Finance, Chime, Monzo, Envel and Douugh- are trying to emulate Simple’s great features to lure Simple customers.
Revolut can make use of this opportunity to lure these Simple refugees as Revolut has already built most of the Simple features everyone raving about.
Fun fact: Simple was basically the blueprint for every smartphone centric bank out there. They were the first to introduce real-time notifications for card payments in collaboration with Visa, before this became a standard feature for card brands. The success and card related feature set of challenger banks more or less relies on features that Visa and Mastercard made available on their IT platforms around 2014. If I remember correctly, card transaction notifications weren’t available when Simple started with the app in 2011 but were introduced with a later app version. They were the first to strongly focus on user experience and I always liked their brand identity.
When BBVA bought Simple back then, BBVAs strong commitment to fintech was exciting. I was hoping that this would provide the support Simple would need to become profitable. It’s a little sad that now BBVA selling their US business to PNC closes that chapter.
Interesting facts. The users of Simple literally worship its budgeting features. Most of them are using the joint account with their spouses and partners. Simple came up with path breaking ideas. Sad that it is being shut down.
Indeed. The shared accounts also were introduced relatively late in the game. What I find especially interesting about this feature is that they opted for a very old school approach here. While Bunq designed a product that is extremely flexible and technically advanced with options like using two different PINs with the same card to select accounts or the option to allocate cards to different sub-accounts that are shared or not on the fly, Simple opted for providing separate cards that have a distinct design. This wasn’t the most fancy option, but it’s great UX with no learning curve and it just works.
One of the other things no one out there adopted was their approach to vaults or budgets or pockets. It was basically the same. The only difference between budget and savings goal was the sing, so first you would save towards a vacation budget, and then during the vacation, you would spend from that budget.
And their “save to spend” feature is legendary. Next to your balance, they would calculate a sum that considered all upcoming recurring transactions before your billing cycle would reset with a salary payment. They also factored in your payments towards your savings goals here.
For me, no one else designed a product so well from the perspective of what actually makes life easier for the user.
The closest contender I’ve seen so far is Up in Australia.
I’m a longtime Simple fan/user, and a bunch of us have banded together on Reddit and Discord to discuss alternatives and try to find something similar.
Revolut’s “Pockets” features for UK accounts seem to be really similar to Simple’s “Expenses”. Unfortunately though, they don’t seem to be available in the USA.
Additionally, Revolut’s mobile UI is really confusing, coming from Simple. I know that Revolut offers a lot more features, but it’s currently not very intuitive. The “ads” for other features and the weird “videos” explaining new sections have also confused a lot of people I’ve talked about this with.
I know that if Pockets were available in the USA, Revolut would be a big contender for many of us looking for alternative banking solutions right now - literally no other bank has done this “correctly” (in our eyes).
That is, nobody has managed to build a checking account that is able to split up one’s paycheck virtually into “Expenses”/“Pockets” and “save up” for upcoming bills - without actually moving them to a completely separate account (like One Finance and Envel are doing).
Y’all might want to get on this…