The bonds have a minimum investment of £2,000 and offer investors a 5.37% return per year until 2023; the offer will close at or before 12 pm on March 29th; Christian Faes, co-founder of LendInvest stated, “We are delighted to be coming back to the market so soon after the successful issue of our first oversubscribed bond in August 2017.” Source
Monzo has added the first batch of partnerships to their marketplace by striking deals with digital wealth investment accounts and online lenders; companies include Scalable Capital, Wealthify, Wealthsimple, WiseAlpha, Zopa, Bricklane.com and Octopus Choice; Monzo will not be making a commission from any of these agreements; the company has also opened up an interim third-party API to comply with open banking regulations. Source.
Savings rates at UK challenger banks are more than 1 percent higher than their high street counterparts; research by challenger Gatehouse Bank revealed the statistics; challenger banks and digital banks are still finding wide knowledge of open banking a challenge; “Sadly too many savers still opt for products from household names as they are unaware of the best buys that exist beyond the high street,“ said Charles Haresnape, CEO of Gatehouse Bank, to AltFi. Source.
Revolut continues to add functionality to their accounts as they apply for their banking license; while Revolut customers have access to card payments, in Europe many utilities require that you pay phone and electricity bills with direct debits. Source
The UK Financial Conduct Authority has granted Coinbase an E-Money License; Barclays is also allowing Coinbase to access the UK’s Faster Payments Scheme which is the core payment infrastructure in the UK; Coinbase’s Zeeshan Feroz stated, “There is no other exchange today that has access to domestic banking. UK consumers today have to jump through all sorts of hoops around sending money to European accounts using euros in order to get money in and out." Source
UK based Tandem Bank has acquired financial management app Pariti; the app has more than 95,000 users that will now be transferred to Tandem Bank; Pariti users will still be able to access their accounts through the Tandem app. Source.
U.K. based personal financial management app Emma recently launched in December and has struck data sharing deals with Starling Bank and Monzo; the app also works across 17 banks to screen scrape data as the banks work towards compliance with open banking; Emma is a budgeting app that helps customers avoid overdrafts and sees a big opportunity with the open banking regulations; “We’re building a tech company, and we understand that the data [play] goes beyond just overdrafts — it’s about understanding when certain events happen, money can be saved or invested,” said Emma founder and CEO Edoardo Moreni to TearSheet. Source.
HSBC looks to become the first major UK based bank to comply with open banking; the bank plans to launch a new app that centralizes information about customers’ accounts; the current plan is set for release in the first week of May and the app will be named Connected Money; HSBC’s UK head of retail banking and wealth management Stuart Haire said the new challenger banks have been have been making progress on customer insight; there is still healthy skepticism about how fast open banking will catch on as incumbents have been slow to comply. Source.
The online lender has named Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Numis Corp to work on their upcoming IPO; the IPO is currently slated for the second or third quarter which may value the company around $2 billion; if successful it would be the largest IPO for a British fintech company; Index Ventures, Union Square Ventures and Accel Partners were early investors in the company. Source
The new plans will allow companies in the EU to apply for a pan-EU license so they can operate across borders; the current system is fragmented and underdeveloped because companies find it restrictive to try to move into neighboring markets; the broader plan is a set of 23 steps meant to help companies scale up across the Eurozone and protect investors. Source.