Monzo faces challenging times with £33m losses
UK mobile-only challenger bank Monzo’s pre-tax losses have more than quadrupled to £33.1 million, according to its latest annual report.
One million accounts by September or October?
As reported in last year’s annual report, Monzo reported a loss after taxation of £6.7 million. Which in turn was worse compared to the 2016 full year results.
In its annual report 2018, figures for its past financial year show customer deposits were £71.2 million, equating to less than £150 per account.
But it did treble its user numbers to 750,000 over the year. In addition, customers spent more than £2 billion through Monzo, and the bank’s headcount has reached 300.
Despite the pre-tax losses, CEO Tom Blomfield anticipates the bank will get one million customer accounts by September or October this year.
Back in July 2017, Monzo took it nice and easy with a steady roll-out of its current account. The bank received its full UK banking licence in April 2017.
The bank is facing plenty of competition – such as Atom, Tandem and Starling. In fact, the number of challenger banks in the UK grows on an almost weekly basis. Check out our comprehensive UK challenger banks list.
Monzo has been working hard to compete.
In November last year, it closed a fundraising round, raising £71 million from Goodwater Capital, Stripe and Michael Moritz.
Earlier this month, Monzo partnered with TransferWise to offer international transfers from the bank’s app.
Currently, the app allows payment to 16 different foreign currencies, and the bank says more are on the way. Users can link up their own TransferWise account to Monzo’s, but it’s not necessary.
In a separate development, Monzo revealed that at 4.55pm (UK time) on 29 June, that Typeform, a company it used to collect survey results in the past, suffered a data breach.
Monzo says its initial investigations suggest that some personal data of about 20,000 people is likely to have been included in the breach.
It explains: “For the vast majority of people, this was just their email address. For a much smaller proportion of others, this may have included other data like their Twitter username or postcode.”
The bank adds: “No-one’s bank details have been affected, and your money and account are safe.
“This breach exclusively affected information people put into Typeform, like email addresses. But things like payment details and passwords are all safe.
“If you’re affected, you’ll get an email from us soon.”
They ripped me
75,000
The app is not good
They are all rippers