Challenger Banks Snapshot: Revolut is becoming the most valuable European FinTech, N26 bigger than HSBC in France and NuBank hits 15M clients

Here is part 3 and final part of the series of articles about GenZ.

In this article I will talk about how mobile banking apps for under 18’s are so appealing for parents and their potential to scale.

You can read part 1 here and part 2 here

Read it more here on my LinkedIn post 

If you have any thoughts or comments about the article - I’m looking forward to hearing them! 

Now, here are my top picks of last week’s challenger banking news:

Europe

Revolut is becoming the most valuable European FinTech, N26 bigger than HSBC in France and Monese plans to hire

Fintech firm Revolut is seeking to raise ￡1.2bn from its investors in the coming months, targeting a valuation between ￡3.9bn and ￡7.9bn to make Revolut the most valuable FinTech company in Europe. Also, Revolut chose BearingPoint RegTech to meet regulatory reporting requirements. In the US, Revolut has been accepting new accounts, currently working through the “American beta” launch.

N26 announced that has Google Play integrated on its app in Switzerland. And in France, N26 surpassed HSBC in number of customers (approximately 900,000 customers), according to the bank’s 2018 report.

Monese, the digital banking start-up, plans to hire about 130 people by the end of 2019, swelling its headcount to 500.

Maltese challenger Laskaris Finance signed a partnership with Temenos to use Temenos’s award-winning product, Temenos Financial Crime Mitigation (‘FCM’)

UK-based Fintech Thought Machine partnered with Swedish financial group SEB. The agreement will see SEB’s innovation studio SEBx deploy Thought Machine’s cloud-native banking platform, Vault.

Challenger bank Tide raised ￡44m from Japanese investment giant SBI, an early spin-off from technology investing powerhouse SoftBank.

OakNorth has announced the appointment of Google’s exec Sunil Chandra as CEO of its next-generation credit platform to lead the growth of the business with co-founders Rishi Khosla and Joel Perlman.

Starling partnered with digital insurance platform Nimbla to offer its 65,000 small business customers the ability to protect themselves from financial losses caused by bankrupt clients.

Cashplus aims to have a 10% market share of all new UK business accounts by 2024, and it counts with nearly 100,000 business customers already.

Anna Money, a UK-based fintech that specializes in SME business banking, has successfully secured its initial ￡3 million equity crowdfunding campaign target on Seedrs.

Yolt users in the UK, France and Italy can apply for a Raisin account and access a wide range of deposit products, directly within the app.

USA

Robinhood launches cash management feature and Chime seeks funding.

Robinhood unveils long-delayed cash management accounts accompanied with a Mastercard.

Celero, a leading solutions integrator, and STACK, one of Canada’s leading fintech disruptors, have announced  a strategic partnership to develop and launch Aura, a new digital member experience and rewards platform, exclusively for credit unions.

Chime, an online banking startup with more than 5 million customers, is close to raising new funding from investors at a valuation that could be of US$5 billion.

Emerging Markets

Nubank exponential growth and Discovery is in an iPhone giveaway. 

Not technically an emerging market, Australia had an eventful week in the challenger bank sector.

The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) hopes that newcomers Volt, Xinja, 86 400 and Judo will drive higher standards across the banking industry

New digital banks 86 400 and Up Bank, plus Bank of Queensland have all slashed the interest rates on their market-leading savings accounts.

Still in Australia, challenger bank Judo has claimed that one out of four requests by SMEs for loans is rejected by the big banks, in what it described as a sign of "significant market failure"

In Latin America, Brazilian Nubank now has 15 million clients, a figure which underlines the rapid growth of the Sequoia Capital-backed venture in Latin America’s largest economy.

In Asia, South Korea’s Viva Republica, the operator of popular local peer-to-peer money transfer app Toss, teamed up with Standard Chartered Bank Korea (SCB Korea) to up its chance of winning the third license for internet-only bank.

Neo bank Juno has raised US$3 million in a seed funding round led by Polychain Capital and Sequoia Capital India’s accelerator programme Surge.

In South Africa, Discovery will give you an iPhone if you join its bank - but there is a catch: customers need to activate the Vitality Active Rewards based on the type of account they have and credit they have available.

NOTE: This article was featured in my weekly newsletter on October 15, 2019. You want to be the first to read the news overview next week? Sign up for my Weekly Challenger Banks Newsletter here

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