Tide reached 150,000 customers, Bunq doubled its total customer deposits, and Starling is launching mobile cheque scanning next week.

Have you ever had a bad first-run experience with a fintech app that made you never use it again? The “first-run” user experience is crucial - if you find an app a little too complicated to use, it’s unlikely you will ever use it again. It’s massively hard to create a smooth first-run user experience, but getting this right pays off.

I understand how tough it could be to get it just right. Therefore, for the second article in a series about Growth Strategies for Fintechs, I focus on User Retention Strategies and analyze the case studies for Credit Karma’s free online tools and Tinkoff Bank’s highly personalized super-app.

If you are just as interested as me in Growth Strategies, you should definitely sign up for the waiting list for the Growth Strategies Marketing Course for FinTechs: https://marcelvanoost.nl/growth 

Now on to the news of the past week!

Tide reached 150,000 customers, Bunq doubled its total customer deposits, and Starling is launching mobile cheque scanning next week.

Thought Machine, which has built cloud-based technology that powers new generation of services on behalf of both old and new banks, is announcing some significant funding — $83 million — a Series B that the company plans to use to continue investing in its platform and growing its customer base.

Pockit, a UK challenger bank that provides vulnerable people with financial services, has received a flurry of claims that it’s locking accounts and withholding customer funds. Pockit doesn’t have a UK banking licence because they issue pre-paid cards, rather it is regulated by the FCA meaning that any money deposited into Pockit accounts are not covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS).

Aion, a newly launched subscription-only banking service provider, is establishing its business operations in Belgium. The bank’s management says that it wants people to get the most out of their money. Aion has an artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced service, called MoneyMax, which is meant to motivate users to earn money on their account balances and also spend less on everyday expenses, including online purchases.

Tide announced that it is close to hitting 150,000 customers or 2.5 per cent of the UK’s SME market. The news comes on the first anniversary of the partnership between Tide and ClearBank, the UK’s first clearing bank in over 250 years.

Starling is launching a mobile cheque scanning next week. Cheque scanning was confirmed to be in development by Starling as far back as November 2018, but it has taken a while to make it to the finish line. Starling says it will be rolling out cheque imaging slowly, and cheques will be limited to ￡500 in value with a weekly limit on the number of cheques that can be scanned per week.

Bunq, the Dutch app-only bank, revealed it doubled its total customer deposits to over €433m in 2019. The bank also announced it helped customers plant over 70,000 trees in three months following the launch of its Green Card that plants a tree for every €100 spent.

Monzo has updated its "tone of voice" guide, so as to ensure its staff and customers don’t feel upset by an ill-chosen phrase in an email or excessive use of emojis. The guide, published on the Monzo website, offers its employees—whose average age is 28—an overview of how they should write and speak internally as well as communicating publicly.

Revolut has taken its first tentative steps into the UK legal services market through a tie-up with a ‘digital lawyer’ start-up. Revolut’s business customers can now access, free of charge, customizable legal contracts, policies and documents as part of the deal with Sparqa Legal. However, customization of legal docs — which include privacy policies, employment contracts, terms and conditions and trademark applications — comes at an additional cost.

B-Social, the London-based fintech building what it calls a “social bank,” announced that it raised a further ￡7.8 million in seed funding. Bringing the total capital raised by B-Social to ￡13.25 million, as the company continues the journey to becoming a fully licensed bank. It also plans to re-brand next month to the new name “Kroo.”

Monese has 100 thousand users in Portugal, a number that is expected to increase at a fast pace during this year. Monese operates an office in Lisbon, where it employs 50 people. Expecting to move next to a larger space it also wants to triple the number of workers it has in Portugal.

Revolut entrance into the US, will facilitates Americans with the purchase of an array of cryptocurrencies. Revolut’s customers in Europe may buy and sell Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and (XRP) for one of 29 fiat currencies. Revolut expects to start offering the same service to its clients in all 50 U.S. states. 

Nubank ended 2019 with a loss of R $ 312.7 million. But the negative result does not seem to raise any major concerns on the part of the institution. The information is in a post published on the Nubank blog, which classifies the result as “directly linked to the level of growth” of fintech. The customer base, moreover, more than tripled: from 6 million at the end of 2018, Nubank reached 19.7 million, with the addition of 13 million new users. In January of this year, the digital bank announced that it had hit the mark of 20 million customers.

Grab raised more than US$850 million from Japan's Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group and TIS to bankroll its expansion into financial services in the region. The sum includes US$706 million from MUFG, Japan's largest bank, and US$150 million from TIS, a provider of data center and cloud services, according to joint statements from the companies.

Kakao Bank, an online-only bank in South Korea, said Tuesday that stock trading services of brokerage firm NH Investment & Securities are now available on its mobile application. Since users’ personal data is already registered on the online bank’s mobile platform, Kakao Bank users can open a securities account on the mobile banking platform more easily than with other services via stock traders’ home trading systems or brick-and-mortar branches.

Tonik raised $6 million in funding as it prepares for a Q3 launch in the Philippines. Tonik, which intends to launch in the coming months with an initial focus on retail deposits and consumer loans, says the Philippines represents a US$140 billion retail deposit market, and a US$100 billion unsecured consumer lending opportunity.

NOTE: This article was featured in my weekly newsletter on March 2nd, 2020. Do you want to be the first to read the next weekly overview? Sign up for my Weekly Digital Banking Newsletter here

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