For the second time this week, we can take time to celebrate some good news in the lending space, as Monzo reported monthly profitability for the first time.
We look in detail at the state of marking recently-private-fintechs to the public market in mid-2021. Multiple industry segments have seen IPOs, direct listings, and SPACs transition fintech darlings into traditional stocks. How is performance doing? Is everything as magnificent and rich as we expected? Have multiples and valuations fallen or held steady? The analysis explores the answers and provides an explanatory framework.
This week, we look at:
Lending Club, the peer-to-peer lending innovator, turning off peer-to-peer lending after having a bank in its pocket
Consolidation of the UK's largest crowdfunders, CrowdCube and Seedrs, and their limited economics
The scale of the Morgan Stanley and Eaton Vance deal, creating a $1.2 trillion asset manager
The struggle of peer-to-peer models more generally, and whether the blockchain movement can overcome the Prisoner's Dilemma
Here are the most read news stories from our daily newsletter today: OCC chief expects SWIFT-like bank-to-blockchain connections in 3...
In this conversation, we break down recently published annual reports from Revolut, Starling and Monzo, three of the leading European digital banks. There are some fascinating insights to be drawn from the documents, especially in the context of the broader global fintech market. This is rich subject matter, and we surely didn’t cover everything.
It is unsurprising that the UK has embraced the financial market shift to fintech, but where do they stand on a global scale?
In this conversation, we talk with Anne Boden, the CEO of Starling Bank. Starling has just turned profitable, and reached several significant milestones in terms of 1.8 million clients, $4 billion in deposits, and $1.5 billion of lending.
That is quite meaningfully ahead of our model, and probably ahead of everyone’s model, of where neobanks would be in 2020. While COVID has accelerated the digital lifestyle, Anne credits deeper demographic, technology, and cultural insights and choices she has made in building Starling for success.
[Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Ryan Weeks, formerly with Dow Jones and AltFi, covering fintech. This is...
This week, we look at:
The financial model behind Monzo, and comparisons to Revolut and Starling
How the Eastern super apps inspired the marketplace model, and why that success is hard for neobanks to replicate
Paths from losing $100 million per year to break-even and enabling digital assets and other financial products
Facebook Financial forming to take over payments and commerce
Leading UK digital bank Monzo released its annual report yesterday and the numbers were not pretty; the company reported that...