What's up you guys, sasha here today, i'm going to talk about something slightly different, i'm going to talk about the nine things that i quite dislike about my styling card and in some cases, maybe things that styling could do to improve them. It's actually quite interesting, because i've noticed that since my first video on styling, when i did a big review and following some of the other videos, a few of the downsides that i mentioned to do with the app and to do with the things that things work Have actually changed and those things have been fixed, it wasn't very public, they didn't really talk much about it, but one or two things have been fixed, but um. There still are a few other things that i really do not like about styling now, a really short disclaimer, and that is most things about styling. I do like, i actually think, they're the best online banking app that you can currently get in the uk.

They, in my opinion, are better than all the others they offer better servicing. They offer better everything else, if you're interested in specifics as to why i like them, go and check some of the videos in the description below i'm going to link them down there, but there are still ways that they can improve. And let me let me get through those nine in in order just before we get into the actual body of the video. I wanted to mention something really important.

The sponsor for this video is no, i i still don't have a sponsor. So if you're watching this video and you're thinking - maybe i should sponsor this guy, maybe the people watching this video would be interested in whatever it is that i have to advertise, get in touch. Send me an email and we'll take it from there anyway. Anyway, let's get let's get into the real deal so first i mentioned this before and i think some of the other people in the comments to the previous videos definitely agree on this, and that is the app layout.

Although the functionality and the things you can do with the app are really really great, the layout is still not as good as it can be, and i do know that they've developed it based on having different features and different functionality in different parts of the app. But it's just not very intuitive. If you look at some of the same features in the way they've been presented, say in monzo, there's, definitely a massively better user experience from that. When you look at the styling app the difference there is, there are three different parts of the app where you can actually go and do things there's the bottom menu, which has you know, different segments where, when you click through to each segment, there's then sub menus And then sub sub menus and so on, but then there's more the top left menu.

When you click on that you get details about your other accounts. If you have more than one, you can apply for a second account through that then there's the huge menu which is very difficult to navigate, because it's just text and the top right. So if you click that you can go and find some other things that you can't find through the others, there's actually other bits as well. If you manage to go and scroll up on the ios app, you can go and get your recent transactions, which is not very easy to do, not very easy to find.

But it is there, but also there's a little plus sign next to the balance where, if you click that you also get an extra sort of sub little menu or some little functionality bit there as well. But it's all kind of haphazard: there isn't a single menu structure. It's all you do you're, not quite sure as to where you should be looking. So if you want your account details, you can get them from the plus sign or from the top right menu.

If you want to send money, you need to go to the bottom river that it's just a bit disjointed. So so i'm not a big fan of that next um. I don't like the fact that paying money out to just like somebody, you know, say you're, buying something you send the money over or to a relative. It's far more difficult than it should be.

This is one of the most primary parts of having a bank account. This is one of the most important features just being able to send money from your account to another account, but in order to do it, there isn't just a click, this button or click this button and then there's a really obvious menus navigate. No, you click. The bottom left option in the bottom ribbon: menu um for transactions and then there's some of the big stuff up top, which they're, obviously trying to make people do more of, like you know, sending money to other people who are styling or some of the other features.

But for regular payments, which is sort of like 90 plus of the type of payments that people are probably going to be doing using the app you have to find that little link at the bottom. You know in small font, where you click that, and only then can you then go and select, who you want to be paying that money to uh from there. So i think i think they could maybe make that a little bit more obvious. Seeing is that probably one of the most primary things that anyone's going to be doing with their bank account? I think i don't like number three, the overdraft functionality now they actually advertise this as part of their account, but there's no simple way for me to be able to then open up that feature.

If i do want access to it going forward, it just tells you that if you have applied for the last 90 days, you won't be able to get it, but maybe i need to go to the customer service and then they'll be able to do it. For me, but it's very clunky there should be a much cleaner, automated or semi-automated way where you can press a button, maybe type in a few things and take some boxes. Saying you've read stuff. If you want to access it um, it's not very intuitive.

I know at setup they do tell you that you can go and get it, but for existing customers who don't have it for whatever reason. I think there should be a better way of accessing it. I've seen some comments from people who said that they did get an overdraft and the overdraft was some crazy high number, and it was more than one comment on my videos - maybe maybe they're lying. Maybe this is anecdotal or whatever, but it does sound like there's.

Definitely some kind of issue there anyway, very closely related to overchat our loans. Now styling have again been advertising their new loans. Their price is 11.5 percent, which is quite high. It is higher than most other premium loans out there, but probably mid market if you're, comparing it to the full range of different loans available to customers.

But here is the thing: they say that you are going to be selected for the loans if they deem you to be eligible, and if you do then the way that you're gon na find that loan feature in your app and that's the only way to apply Is if you go to spaces in the bottom right hand, corner of your menu? I know how obvious is that relating to my first thing that i didn't like about starting and there at the top you'll have another menu option on top of your spaces, which would be the loan where you can go and apply for it. But the thing is, it is not very clear as to exactly how you qualify, how they select people. I have a pretty reasonable credit profile. I managed to pass every single credit check for every single credit product i applied, for.

I didn't never really had any credit issues and i do a lot of this kind of stuff because i review lots of credit products. I don't have that loan feature open to me. Maybe it's because i didn't opt for the overdraft facility. Maybe it's something else.

Maybe my account is too old too new. I don't know whatever it is, but i kind of feel that maybe my example is anecdotal, but all the same i would have thought that i'd have at least the option to apply. Given that i have a pretty reasonable credit profile - and i guess the same applies to other people as well - so either they're very much restricting and limiting the number of people who are eligible for loans, because they're only just starting out or there's just some technical issues And some issues and bedding this feature in anyway, next marketplace. They have been talking about this marketplace for quite some time and trying to position it as the big differentiator for styling.

The reason why maybe you should choose it over some other bank account and i went and looked at this marketplace and there's two massive issues with it number one. It has a very small number of providers, obviously only the certain companies that have managed to do a commercial deal with starling, where their commissions are high enough or some other reason like that. So it's a very small number of companies, but the thing i don't like is there's absolutely zero. Integrations they talk about it being a marketplace.

They talk about it being an app that you enable you know to make it look like it's properly integrated like the two works seem to sit together, but you can click on one to them and all that happens. Is you get taken completely out of the app out of the styling world onto the application screen for the other provider and if you go and apply and get that other thing then start and get that kickback everyone's happy? Of course, they'll work just the same as they will work with any other bank account, but the thing i don't like about it is they make it look like the two are seamlessly integrated and sort of you access one through the app etc. But that's just not how it works. It's just a way for starting to make a bit of extra revenue number six thing i really don't like about starting is their spaces.

Now i know that they've been trying to work on it and there is a rumor going around that they're gon na enable a much much better version of spaces in the course of the next couple of months. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but the current version of spaces is really really quite poor. They're trying to mimic the thing that a lot of monsters customers really like with their pots, features where you can go and assign money to different parts. And you can have transactions automatically come out of those parts and their debits come out of those parts and all that kind of good stuff.

Here you can't do any of that here, you can just go and set up a space, add a photo, add a name and have a target and sort of manually move money into it and there's a few other bells and whistles. But it's super restricted. There's very little points to actually using these spaces because you have to manually move money in and out of those spaces, and it doesn't really give you that kind of fluid flexibility that monzo has it doesn't allow you to automatically post direct debits to it, automatically push Transactions based on criteria to it or anything else like that, so i think that is probably the biggest thing from my perspective that styling really should focus on, because that's the one feature that i get probably dozens, if not probably hundreds of comments on where people say That is the one reason why they're sticking with monzo and they're not going to move over styling because of that particular feature. So if that feature gets improved over the next few months, i see a lot of new customers joining on board as well.

Let's move to number seven number: seven is probably not very interesting or applicable to most people, but i think it's really indicative of how styling think about their business. So they have two different apps for android and for ios, and they have their website and the three are incredibly different, built in completely different way. Even the two apps work in a very, very different way to each other, the functionality is very different. The way that you swipe up and down and the places where different buttons are and the menus and the layout and it's not different, because you can't do the same thing on both apps, because you can, because there is pretty much nothing that you can do on.

Ios that you can't do on android and vice versa, in terms of that basic layout and that kind of stuff it's just because you know the two apps are developed by two different teams and they solve the same thing through different means, and i don't really understand Why you would go about doing that, because if somebody uses one app and then transfers to using the other, suddenly there's a discrepancy if somebody goes and makes a video about styling and shows how to do stuff and show some interesting tricks and interesting things in the App then, all the users, with the other version, go and leave comments below that video saying, but my app doesn't have that my app doesn't work in that way. At all, it looks completely different and all because the two are not the same, and i don't really understand why you wouldn't ensure that both have exactly the same feature set and working exactly the same way. I that seems like it would be quite obvious, and especially if you have somebody who say has one and then switches to the other. I know that's not that many people, but it does happen.

It will be just really annoying frustrating. If suddenly, the same app looks and works completely differently to how it used to look and work anyway. Let's move on to the next point that i really don't like, which is closely related, which is to do with online banking. Now they've recently introduced online banking, where the previously didn't have it at all, which is you can go and access your styling bank through the web portal and and that's great that's a massive step up, because i don't understand why that wasn't available.

In the first place, you know, if you're doing big transactions, if you're doing certain other things like analyzing, your spending, etc. Some people just prefer to do it on their desktop, but here's my problem, they sort of did the bare minimum possible to go and make the online banking work, and that means most of the features. Almost all of the features that run on the app are not available through the online banking platform. I'm not even talking about some of the more sophisticated things like authorizing transactions or viewing the various help, sections or accessing you know any of the intricate bits of menus and sub menus, but even basic stuff like sending money.

You can't go and log in to onto your banking, on your desktop and go and send money to somebody who gives you their bank account details. You have to go and do that through the app you can only access and view transactions that have already happened or that are pending, and i think that's a massive miss if i'm sending a large transaction. I would much prefer to do it by using my desktop, because i can go and copy things across properly. I know that i'm haven't missed a digit.

I know that i can double check by having two things in the same screen very easily and comparing the two together. Let's say i'm buying a house and i'm putting forward a deposit and sending that over to my lawyer, for example, in that kind of situation, i would be extremely wary of only having my app as the only way of being able to do it. I just think there are good reasons why desktops exist for this kind of thing, and i think it's not a particularly difficult thing to code up from experience of doing it a lot myself. So i really think they could work a lot more over the coming months to make the desktop app as useful as possible, at least matching all the different features that you can do in the app last - and this is again a relatively minor point, but styling also Allow you to do joint accounts so that you can do business accounts.

You can do single personal accounts and you can do joint accounts, but the one thing that i quite dislike that i personally discovered recently is: you can only set up a join styling account if both people have the single account opened first. So if you don't want a single account with styling, if you have your personal account somewhere else, and you want to join an account with somebody in styling, you can't do it without setting up a personal bank account and starting first and once both people have their Personal accounts, then you can have your two phones and place them near each other and go instead of your join account. That way, and that's quite a nice process. But it seems like a little bit of a missed opportunity here, where, if somebody has a single account and wants to open a joint account with somebody else or if both people don't have a single account, they just want to open a joint account and not the Other ones as well, it kind of feels like it would be a much better experience to be able to offer that as an option without having to open the other accounts.

Because not everyone wants to have a personal and a joint account, and you know it does depend person and person. Some people like having both some people like only having one or the other, but i kind of feel i understand why they do it, because the personal account is linked to the person's id and the joint account obviously takes those two ids and links them. I i understand why they technically probably did it, but it seems like a really obvious misstep, because you can't have a joint account without having a personal one anyway. If you think that there are massive downsides, that i've missed out on go and listen in the comments below i'd love to hear your thoughts, if you have any other comments about styling that i didn't talk about, make sure you go and leave a comment as well.

If you like this video, please make sure you go and smash that like button for the youtube algorithm, it is so incredibly important so that youtube can understand that you, like this video, if you're interested in more videos about personal finance, about making more of the money That you have go and subscribe to this channel. That is exactly what i talk about three times a week on this channel. Thank you so much for watching. I really really appreciate it and i'll see you guys later.

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