Scaling a challenger bank is, well, a challenge, but Monzo is up for the task.
Despite reporting £6.7 million (about $8.7 million) in losses for the 12 months ending in February, the startup is on track for signing between 500,000 and 800,000 users by the end of the year (up from 240,000 active accounts), the company said in its annual report released this week.
Launched in 2015, the company plans to roll out its current account offering, CEO Tom Blomfield said in the report:
We try to avoid “big bang” launches, instead preferring to roll-out new features iteratively. This reduces risk and ensures we can continue to offer people the level of service they’ve come to expect from Monzo. We have about fifty current accounts live today among our staff, and we’ll soon progress to a few thousand customers. At the moment, we’re aiming to offer the current account to all existing customers in late summer. The wait might be frustrating at times for our community, but it’s important to get it right. We have a responsibility to keep our customers’ money safe.
Blomfield stresses the importance of profitability for Monzo, but it won’t be a priority for this year. Instead, the company will focus on growth and raising additional capital in early 2018. “If we grow even faster than expected, we may need to accelerate funding plans. We are also exploring ways to include a crowd component in the next investment round to include as many of our community as possible,” he said in the report.
As opposed to many upstarts in the market today, Monzo is not in the business for building a full-service bank, according to Blomfield:
[We] want to build a powerful financial control centre for a billion people. We don’t want to be a fullservice bank, offering Monzo mortgages or Monzo credit cards. Instead, we want to be a platform or marketplace that gives people visibility and control of all of their money, whichever providers they use. The future of banking is data and identity.
At the same time, in order to stay on track for profitability, the company will start “experimenting with lending functionality” by offering “lending tools to help people manage their day-to-day finances more effectively,” Blomfield said.