EMI vs bank: the sentence every neobank review should open with

A Visa card proves nothing. Monzo and Starling are UK banks. Wise personal is an EMI. Revolut is both, depending on the product you opened. If a page cannot say which, it is an affiliate list, not a register.

What a bank can say

A licensed bank takes deposits and, in the UK, eligible balances fall under FSCS up to £85,000 per person per authorised firm. In the euro area the figure is €100,000. In the US, FDIC is $250,000 at the insured bank — not at the fintech brand.

What an EMI can say

An e-money institution must safeguard client funds, usually in a segregated account at a bank or in high-quality liquid assets. That is a recovery process, not a statutory pay-out scheme. It is real. It is not FSCS. Marketing that says “protected” without naming the scheme is the tell.

The partner-bank problem

Chime is not a bank. Mercury is not a bank. Fi is not an RBI bank. Synapse showed what happens when the middleware’s ledger and the insured bank’s ledger diverge: users freeze even if the bank is solvent. Always name the issuer.

How this register scores it

Safety is 25% of the mark. A full charter with a named scheme outranks a beautiful EMI. An EMI with named safeguarding outranks a yield app. A yield app is a loan you made to a company.