Monzo founder and CEO Tom Blomfield.Monzo
Monzo is currently running a crowdfunding campaign to raise £2.5 million, alongside £19.5 million raised from institutional investors. The company, which currently offers a pre-paid card linked to an app, is valued at £65 million in the round.
The two-year-old startup has put out an investment deck as part of the campaign, which gives some interesting insight into the company’s future plans.
Monzo currently only operates in the UK, but the second to last slide on the investment deck is headed: “Additional capital will allow us to expand into Europe, the US and Asia.” It continues: “By 2017, our UK banking authorisation should allow us to operate across Europe under our own licence, generating revenue from personal lending.”
Monzo touts the potential to access 500 million consumers once it enters Europe. Expansion to both the US and Singapore, the likely Asian hub, is also on the cards. Both would come through partnerships with a local sponsor bank, Monzo says.
Does this mean the total £22 million Monzo is raising will take it overseas? Not quite. CTO Jonas Huckestein told BI over email: “Whilst international expansion is core to our long-term strategy, our short-term focus is on launching the world’s best current account in the UK and that is what this capital will be used for.”
Monzo is simply advertising what its long-term strategy will be and will likely have to raise additional funds at some point in the future to fund overseas expansion.
But new markets aren’t a distant prospect either. When BI asked Huckestein about how Brexit would affect European expansion plans, he said: “In the unlikely event that Brexit occurs before we can passport our licence to other countries, we would have to get a licence from scratch in those countries. This would be annoying but not the end of the world.”
Monzo CTO Jonas Huckestein.Monzo
Either way, Monzo may well have to apply for a local licence once Brexit occurs. Theresa May has signalled she wants Britain to leave the European Single Market, meaning banks’ right to passport local licences across the bloc would be lost.
Other interesting tidbits gleaned from Monzo’s investment deck include:
- 120,000 people have a funded account and most growth has come from social media or word-of-mouth;
- Over £100 million has been spent on its pre-paid cards;
- 60% of cards are being used at least once a month;
- Customers spend an average of £370 per month and make 324 card transactions a year;
- Card fraud peaked at £40,000 a week but is down by 95%, implying a max of £2,000 lost to fraud per week;
- 99% of customer service is dealt with by in-app chat systems and an early AI system being trialled can currently identify 80% of questions asked correctly;
However, one thing notably absent from the investment deck is any concrete financial information. The startup is essentially pre-revenue but no figures are given for burn rate, balance sheet, or any other insight. Accounts filed in November show Monzo lost £1.4 million in the 13 months to February 2016 and had £567,714 in net assets, including £320,498 of cash in the bank.
Regardless of a lack of financial info, the investment deck is obviously having the desired effect with investors. Monzo is running a pre-registration system for its crowdfunding campaign after it crashed Crowdcube’s platform last year (it went on to raise £1 million in just 96 seconds). The campaign was already almost three times oversubscribed within 24 hours of opening pre-registration and, as of 11.30 a.m. GMT (6.30 a.m. ET) on Thursday, pledges have hit £8.7 million.
Here’s Monzo’s full investment deck if you want to take a look (with thanks to the company for letting us reproduce it here):
Leave a Reply
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
