Ok here we go. I’ve had a good look at this.
Short summary – If you’re only doing it for the sign up bonus it’s not worth it.
If you want to use it to invest, read on.
A couple too many orange (but not red flags) for me and I wont be putting any money in this one at the moment. In some respects, it is a bit pyramidy. That's not to say its a scam, not at all, it's just the way the company have decided to market it. Quite cleaver really because they get to band the £40 figure around in their adverts without ever actually having to pay it to anyone and pretty much force you to invest your own money instead.
Allow me to elaborate. When you join, you get a £40 credit. But you can’t withdraw it, only leave it to accrue interest (which you can withdraw) They also give you your own referral code to post around and encourage you to do so, saying there is no limit to the £40 credits you can get, so sign up as many people as you want. Thing to note is all these £40 credits expire after 6 months unless you deposit at least £50 of your own money and maintain an active account. So in order to benefit beyond an initial few pence of interest you have to put your own cash in and keep the account active.
Some other orange flags:
They were called out by bitcointalk forum in Feb last year for having fake employee profiles on the website. These were subsequently taken down but its not something you would expect a company responsible for your money to have done.
There is no FSCS protection on your money.
Yes they are FCA registered. But so was Nick Leeson.
They are backed by Wecash, a big Chinese credit referencing and loans company which is not regulated by UK.
The 5% Easy Access Money Pot fund sounds like a high street savings account but it is not. Your money is not held in a bank. Only your initial deposit is held in cash, when you then invest it in the 5% fund it is converted to cyrpto (something called a BGBP stablecoin) This money is then used by Zeux to invest in secured loans through Wecash. The funds are used to lend out to Asian corporate and individual loans. I don’t know how risky these might be in terms of defaults.
I contacted customer services about the 5% interest rate. The good news is they responded within 24hrs which is encouraging. The bad news is they couldn’t say how long the 5% rate will be held for, just repeated that it was a promotional offer.
No Physical debit card.
In July last year they launched their own alt coin called zeuxcoin. This has pretty much bombed and the volumes of it traded are also well down so it doesn’t appear to have been very popular. You don't have to buy the coin to use the app though. (and I wouldn’t)
Also there are Positives
5% interest rate with instant access.
Interest accrues daily
Extra interest from bonus credit if you can get lots of referrals ( might do really well for someone with a finance blog who can post their referral link around)
The funds in the 5% Easy Access Money Pot are guaranteed by both Wecash and Zeux. In the event of Zeux having a meltdown Wecash are supposed to step in and pay back creditors. (although in the event something did go wrong how you would actually get your money back in unclear)
Can do all the apple pay and smart phone banking stuff if your into that.
- Its a platform into crypto if your also into that
- Easy and cheap to send money abroad
- No fees
Backed by a big company, albeit in China.
- Speedy reply from customer services
- Access to other crypto investment accounts paying decent rates also available once you've signed up.
- Mostly good reviews so far from trust pilot.
So that's everything I found out.
