| Thanks for sharing your story and for the thoughtful feedback BukhariH! We thought a lot about the current players and offerings in the space, and came to similar conclusions about some of the pitfalls. That being said, we have made two observations that we are looking to explore by launching Atlantic Money: 1. By deliberately going the super-app route, and trying to be something for everyone, super apps are crappy user experiences, and they aren't a very strong business (outside of south-east Asia). We are looking to be a focused product, and are committing to not building a bunch of additional features into our app over time that customers probably don't want and are likely going to make the experience adversarial. 2. Super apps are not targeted. We believe that costs can pile up if you don't have a target customer. Our thesis is that we want to be a very good option for customers moving larger sums of money, and we've explicitly focused on that segment in terms of corridors, and our fixed pricing. We'll see how it goes with the launch, but would welcome any feedback - either here, or feel free to reach out directly. |
£3 flat sounds basically impossible become profitable on. Especially considering you're going for higher volume customers. Yes you have chosen a segment with low overheads (bank to bank transfers), but you will still have the burden of costs that scale very poorly with the volume of £ moved and number of customers served (e.g. CS, AML, KYC etc). Usually revenue (and some costs) that scales with volume is the route to profitability here, but you've explicitly forgone it!
So, in my opinion, your prices will have to rise substantially (most likely) or you will do something akin to what Robinhood did with PFOF and make the customer the product, which is to say, exploit them without them knowing. Sorry if this sounds harsh but your setup currently falls into the category of things that sound too good to be true, would love to hear how you plan to overcome it.
Having said all this I wish you the best of luck, hope to be proven wrong!
(edit: to clarify, i'm considering a business model without significant cross subsidisation - in which case this transfer product would still be loss making in isolation)