If you're looking for a review of the best uk challenger banks, wouldn't it be nice if you could watch somebody who has literally got every single one of them gone through and looked at every single feature analyzed and compared them and dissected. Everything read every single bit of paperwork dug into every single number and then just told you what they thought. I thought so, and that is exactly why i went ahead and done exactly what i just said. I've got all the different ones that you might want to be considering.

So i've got all the main contenders here: we've got, styling, we've got monzo, we've got monies, we've got revolut and we have bunk and i'm gon na tell you what i think about these and which one i would pick for different situations, but i'm not gon na. Go into every single one in the best possible detail, because straight after this review, you will notice that there's going to be a bunch of different videos coming out where i'm going to go through each one in turn, and i'm going to go into a huge amount Of detail, except for monzo, i've already released a review of monzo a few weeks ago. So, if you're interested in that make sure you go and check that one out, the other ones will be coming down the line. So if you're interested in challenger banks in the uk and you're interested in some of the really detailed views on what works and what doesn't work and what i think about them make sure you hit that subscribe button make sure you hit the bell.

So you get notifications they're going to be coming out every single time. One of my new videos comes out over the next week in a bit so mondays, wednesdays and fridays. I hope you like them. A lot of time has gone into putting these together.

So, first off, let's cover one really important thing before we get any further, and that is that three of these are banks that actually offer a bank account, and two of these are not and there's a really big reason why you need to know that now, stalin And monzo are both uk registered banks. Bunk is an actual bank that is based in the netherlands, so they hold a banking license, but it is not a uk banking license, so it offers you protections, but in a slightly different kind of way. Under netherlands, legislation, revolut and monies are not banks, they are both fintechs. They both offer a lot of interesting features and functionality as part of their accounts, but they are not banks, so any money you hold with them does not sit in an actual bank account.

This means that it is not protected so with the other ones, in particular the styling of monzo they're, protected by the financial compensation scheme, and that means, if anything, should happen to your account, if anything should happen to one of the companies up to 85 000 pounds Worth of money with each provider is going to be covered and you can reclaim that with bunk. You have equivalents similar protection levels over in europe, so i think it's up to 100 000 euros is protected with them. So that's a whole separate thing. It's not quite as straightforward, because obviously dealing with the uk entity is going to be a bit easier and what this also means is banks are going to be considerably more tightly regulated, there's going to be a lot more protections in the way their systems work.

A lot more oversight in how they deal with customers funds a lot more focus on making sure that everything that they do is robust. This isn't the case with monies and revolut, because they're just not governed by the same legislation and they're not covered by the same provisions so regardless of which one you pick you'll, be able to do the basic functionality with each single one of them reasonably well. So you can open a brand new account. You can load money into that account.

You can then spend it either using the card or online, and you can then view your transactions online and that is relatively consistent and they all offer that and they're all reasonably good. The only thing i don't like is with bunker minis, there's some fees that you really have to be very careful with. You have to go and check exactly what you do and don't have to pay for if you're spending too much money or you're loading too much money or you're, sending money from pounds to euros. There's going to be a few issues here with bunk and there's some issues that are similar with the knees with monzo and styling.

There are no issues whatsoever so until recently, styling and monzo both had the same business model, which is you had one type of account. The account was free and it offered you everything that the bank would like you to use as part of that account, monies revolut and bunk each have a three-tiered pricing model. They all offer a free option and the free option does allow you to do some really basic stuff, but it is incredibly constrained the moment you go slightly outside the boundaries you either can't do it or you have to pay extortion fees, so most people probably won't Go for the cheap free option, or if they do, they will be forced to upgrade sooner rather than later, and what will then happen is you'll pay the 699 799, whatever amount of money for the middle option, all three will offer you a super expensive premium option. Revolute and bunk will bundle in a metal card.

Don't ask me why you need a metal card they just like to make you feel more premium than their account actually is. Bunk will then plant a bunch of trees for you as long as you're paying the 16.99 a month for the privilege, i'm generally not a fan at all of the way that the freemium option works for these cards. If you choose a free one, you may not even get a card with some of them. It's just so restrictive that basically they're kind of forcing you to pay and, in my opinion, for a bank to force you to pay to use their services in the modern day in the uk.

It's really just not on because you can go and get a free bank account from a lloyds, an rbs and hsbc a whatever. It is at barclays and it will do pretty much everything that you want in terms of basic banking and you won't have to pay any fees. So just because these are cool and offer you a neon colored card and because they're online and have an app. It doesn't make them any better.

Now, in the last few days, monzo have actually gone down the same road and they've launched the monzo plus, i'm not sure if it's actually going to stick out if you're interested there's a whole video i've put out where i've reviewed the brand new monzo plus there's Going to be a link up there and i'm gon na put a separate link in the description below so go and check that out. If you're interested, i don't think most people will be interested just before you go and watch this video um. It doesn't really offer you very much. You have to pay five pounds a month for very, very limited bonuses and features, so monzo has sort of joined the others on that path.

Styling hasn't done so yet, and i really like that. I really respect that with styling. If you sign up for an account, you get all the different features as part of that account and they all come for free now, if you're looking for a bank account that is going to give you the best possible app experience, i would pick monzo and the Reason i picked monzo is because their app has the best navigation, the easiest to use menu system out of all of these. By far, i think the navigation is definitely uh.

The best thing there. They have these nice pots, where you can apportion money from your main account into these various different savings pots or various different things that are designed for particular transaction types. They have some other big wins like you can assign particular transactions to come out of one of these pots automatically in the future, which is extremely useful. If you have recurring transactions say if you're paying rent or if you're, paying regular monthly bills or whatever it is, that is a really nice feature and although monies and bunk have sort of tried to copy it and revolute and do something that is not quite the Same but in some way, similar monzo is still definitely the best, the easiest to use and the most intuitive and they've gamified it a little bit.

You can even add little photos and it actually looks really nice. It is maybe a gimmick for some people, but for the people who really like to use the app a lot and really look at their spending and analyze it and breaking down. Monzo is definitely going to be the best option if you're looking for something that has the most enormous number of features, whether you need them or not, you might want to go and pick revolut now. These guys have bundled absolutely everything into the app you can trade stocks and shares.

You can go and buy insurance for your phone and travel and whatever you can go and get discounts in shops. You can send money abroad at amazing rates. You can do a huge amount. The issue is that each individual thing you can do is actually very narrow and very restricted, because they've got so many different things.

They haven't been able to focus on doing one really well, except for the currency bill. The currency bit is where they really started their business and something they're quite good at so converting currency and sending money abroad in a different currency. That is the one feature the revolut is better than the others at um at the moment, and probably will stay there. So, if you're interested in a card that allows you to pay various things abroad, easily send money to bank accounts all over the world in europe, whatever you will probably want to pick revloud out of these options, but if i was wanting to do that, i probably Wouldn't pick a bank account that does it.

For me, there are other services that offer amazing value for an exchange like transferwise, that personally, i'm a big transferwise fan and that's what i use and i would pick one of the other bank accounts and use a separate third-party service for the foreign exchange stuff, because The bank account will actually be better for it out of all these cards. There's one i probably wouldn't recommend people in the uk to get, and that is bunk now. Bank and n26 were the two accounts from europe that went and set up in the uk by using their european banking licenses. N26 has since quit.

The market. Bunk is still here, there's a bunch of issues. First of all, you have to use their account in euros. They don't even have a pound-based account, so everything gets translated.

The exchange rates are good, but if you're loading money into your bank account, you will have to pay fees if you're loading from any regular uk bank account because you're going to be essentially paying in euros and that's not a very good experience. There's other restrictions, like the account really doesn't allow you to do very much. The app is extremely confusing and really badly designed. It is impossible to find what you're looking for no matter how long you've spent looking.

If you found it once, you won't find it any faster. The second time the default is a dark look where the screen is black and the writing is white and it's really really grainy. If you change it to a light background, the white writing remains white. So you can't actually see it, so i think the design and the features are extremely lacking.

The fact that it's not in pounds is actually really annoying frustrating and it doesn't let you do basic stuff like, for example, you get the right debits, you're gon na run into issues with bunk, because you can't do them. So if i was choosing a bank account from these challenger banks, i definitely wouldn't be picking that one now, if i had to pick one of these to be my new bank account, it would 100 without a question, be styling. Now, i'm not affiliated with any of these. I don't get paid to do these reviews.

I don't get any kind of commission for doing them. This is just my personal opinion over here, but let me tell you why i really really like styling. First, you can tell that every single bit of the customer journey is incredibly deeply thought out. The application journey is incredible.

It is the best out of these. By far it is the most slick it is the easiest to complete, and it's just the little things that i really like. The envelope that the card arrives in is really nice they're. The only card that actually have the bank account number printed on the back, which makes it very easy to use.

Monzo is a bank, but you don't actually have your bank account printed on it, so you have to go into the app to go and find out what that is. Although the design of the card is vertical, they thought about the usability of this and the back of the card where the card number and all the details are printed is horizontal and what this means is, if i'm using amazon or one of the other services that Takes a photo of your card in order to pay for things, they will actually recognize a number, because they've even used the same font that a regular card would have in order to increase that usability. So what they've done is they've gone, really really deep into thinking about how the customers would actually use this and made the thing work just right now. Styling banks app is not as easy to navigate as monzo's, but it has some really big advantages.

One. They don't try to upsell you onto their premium, plus account two. They have some features which none of the other ones have, which are actually useful in real life. For example, you can take photos of a check in order to be able to load it into your bank account you don't have to post it and wait.

Three weeks, like you, do with monzo some of the other ones, you can't load checks in at all. You can go and deposit cash and withdraw cash at any post office location around the uk for free with the starting app with monzo. You can't do it. You actually have to pay a fee with some of the other ones.

You can't do it at all, so the fact that they offer you this is amazing. The post office actually has more branches than a normal bank does in the uk. So in this way, they're even better than your high street bank now sterling does not offer you trading styling does not offer you some weird insurance. It doesn't offer you weird discount, gimmicks and specific stores.

It doesn't offer you a myriad of different options for sending money abroad and all of those other things, and that is why i, like it, they're not trying to sell me something on every single corner. I don't see a pop-up saying: would you like to pay 6.99? A month, just because i happen to have opened the app and they're trying to sell me something if i'm not looking to trade, i don't have to go and have my menu cluttered up by things that are trying to sell me stocks etfs, whatever else different instruments That i can buy and i actually think a bank account that does the bank account stuff. Well is what you want from a bank account, so i actually have all of these accounts and to be fair, i don't think i'm going to be keeping all of them for several different reasons. I'm going to be closing the bunk one, because this is just not in any way useful, especially if you live in the uk, i think in europe you may see more benefit from it, but the fact that it actually costs you money.

The fact that it limits you to not being able to use a lot of basic functionality means that i'm not going to be keeping that one at all my knees i don't like because they do offer you the basic functionality. But then the two other big features in the account the lending and the savings are not even provided by them and they try to make it slightly confusing and not very clear. So they have a section where you can go and borrow money within the app. But the moment you go and click through enough screens, they actually just send you to a different company called monivo where you can go and type in all your details.

Basically comparison website. It doesn't really make it any good. They didn't help you fill in the form, you have to basically go and do everything from scratch and they just get a kickback if you happen to go and take out a loan or a credit card through this other provider, the same thing goes for savings. They try to go and send you to this company called raisin, and that bit is slightly more transparent and clear.

But again they don't really offer you any features of their own. They just keep trying to sell you services by other companies because they get some kind of commission from them revolut, i'm kind of interested to see what they do. The issue i have is that the basic account is so basic that i actually don't really want to have it the other ones. I have to pay a monthly fee for, and i don't really want to be paying a monthly fee for a service that i don't like when i was reviewing revolut and make sure you watch out for that review.

That's coming in a few days, i got into some seriously annoying issues with the app it kept. Locking me out. I kept getting a white screen of death where it would just be on that screen, and i had to wait several hours for that thing to refresh and actually allow me to use it. I tried to delete the app and reinstall it and that just made the issue even worse.

The app froze in various different places doing slightly different things and it froze in slightly different ways. I get that allowing you customers to do things like trade is a nice feature in theory, but the way they've implemented is super restrictive. You can only trade up to 300 stocks, the information they provide. You is extremely limited, so that particular thing: if you're genuinely wanting to trade, you wouldn't use revolut for it.

Some people who want to just buy one share of something for fun might do it, but you're not going to attract any real people doing investments. I hope you guys like this. If you have one of these accounts and you love it, please make sure you leave a comment below. I would really love to hear your thoughts and whether you agree or disagree with me.

If you have one of these and you hate it make sure you absolutely leave a comment below i'd really be interested to hear what you have to say. In any case, if you enjoyed this roundup review, make sure you smash that, like button for the youtube algorithm, it is incredibly important to get a video like this to be shown to more people so that this channel can grow and so that i can reach more People with this type of information, if you're interested in reviews of each of these cards in specific detail, some of these are really long and in depth. Make sure you subscribe to this channel if you haven't done so already make sure you hit that bell. So you get notifications if you've already subscribed hit the bell so that each time one of these reviews comes out, you get notified and you don't miss anything i'll see you guys later.