Confidence in Monzo has been confirmed as the challenger bank discloses details of its latest funding round with multiple investors laying down multi-million pound figures.
Amounts of £13 million, £5 million and £1.5 million were issued by Thrive Capital, London’s Passion Capital and Orange Digital Ventures, respectively. This accumulated capital, of £19.5m, will be used by Monzo for its full launch later this year.
At present Monzo has over 100,000 users, who are offered access to a pre-paid MasterCard and accompanying Android and iOS apps. Features include the ability to view transactions connected to a geolocation feature and a map, and a system for tracking real time spending.
Another prominent challenger bank is Starling, having been granted a UK banking license from the Prudential Regulatory Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority last year. Starling is currently close to achieving its launch, which was initially forecast to be in January.
Starling secured $70 million in funding from the founder of private investment firm QuantRes Harald McPike. This is indicative of the capital required to initiate the process of a full launch.
READ NOW: Top 5 challenger banks
A challenger bank that is further down the line is MetroBank, which has chosen to have a traditional physical presence; with plans to have 200 branches open by 2020.The bank has in excess of 650,000 customer accounts. Metro Bank was the first high street bank to break through in the UK in 150 years.
Content from our partners
Following Monzo’s launch, the bank intends to follow suit with traditional banking forms at first, offering transparent overdrafts. In the future however, Monzo intends to set itself apart for the long term.
TechCrunch reported that the “The company will aim to give its customers one-click access to a broad range of financial products from third parties as part of a move towards ‘banking as a marketplace’.”
