Monobank is a Ukrainian bank app that was designed for online banking. The bank was launched in 2017 under the license of Universal bank. The founders of the project are Oleg Gorokhovsky, Dmitry Dubilet and Mikhail Rogalsky who previously were employed at Privatbank and took the positions of managers there. They had to leave the financial institution due to nationalization of the bank. This is how a new fintech project was launched that evolved into a new app called Monobank. The amount of investments into the project reached 2 million euros. The facility stands apart from most financial institutions as it is presented online only and doesn’t have offline branches. Actually, the facility doesn’t have a permission to establish a brick-and-mortgage office since it is a virtual bank or just an application without a banking license. In 2017, the app was launched in a beta testing mode and immediately acquired the customer base of 17K people.
The fintech company reached a significant success since the service of neobanks is highly demanded currently. Besides, this is the first mobile bank of Ukraine. Within the first year of work, it issued more than 400K bank cards. In 2020, the team of developers added new currencies to the functionality, so users of the facility were allowed to open foreign currency deposits. Additionally, the platform started issuing virtual cards in USD and EUR. Since the customer base was almost 3 million people at that time, the staff involved in the maintenance of the app reached 700 employees. In 2022, the number of Monobank users doubled and exceeded 6 million people.
One of the problems with monobank is the problem with cash withdrawals through Universal Bank, since it does not have a developed network of ATMs. Monobank makes up the bulk of Universal Bank’s profits, thanks to which the bank’s profit grew 15 times over the three quarters of 2019, to 510.2 million UAH.
Monobank highlights
The facility allows clients to send and receive international transfers in foreign currency to different countries around the world using instant money transfer systems. It can be SEPA, MoneyGram, ria money transfer, Payoneer, SWIFT, Western Union, or VISA/MasterCard cards. The list of countries where users can send transfers can be found on the official website of the platform. The sender can choose the currency of the transfer payment. It can be hryvnia, dollar or euro. The amount can vary from 1 USD/EUR/UAH to 30K USD/EUR/UAH.
There are also limits on the number of operations. It shouldn’t exceed 5 operations per week, and 10 operations per month. P2P transfers are conducted immediately if the recipient’s card supports this type of operation. If the card does not support instant operations, you can make a transfer that becomes available to the recipient within 3 days. The interface notifies of these details before sending the payment.
At the time of writing, Internet acquiring is a relatively new service from Monobank, which only started providing the feature. However, it is clear that this is a profitable trading tool for merchants. Businesses can accept card payments on their websites, mobile apps, and online stores.
The platform provides the API functionality to its users to make the service convenient to users. Clients need to go through the authorization procedure in their personal accounts to grant access.
Monobank fees
The transfers from the Monobank card are carried out without commission when it comes to your money. If you transfer credit funds, the fee is 4%. A transfer from a Monobank card to a card of a foreign bank will cost 1% of the amount, but not less than 1 dollar or 1 euro at the expense of own money and 4% at the expense of credit.
How to connect to the service
Merchants can send the request to connect to the system on the official website of the platform.
