Leading UK digital bank Starling Bank has raised an additional £40m in funding, this is in additional to the £60m...
Writing a guest post on FT Alphaville Victor Basta, the managing director of Magister Advisors talks bout the struggle digital banks face in making a profit; digital banks have certainly made a name for themselves and offer a better product to the consumer; rising customer acquisition costs and the tough scaling of affiliate agreements are just two of the reasons these banking startups will find it a challenge to reach profitability; the future looks like potential acquisition of digital banks for technology or merging with other fintechs to form a stronger conglomerate. Source.
UK digital bank Starling Bank is now available to a broader set of users; still in a beta testing phase, the firm is now adding additional clients beyond just friends, family and product testers; as enhancements to the platform it recently announced its public API, which will allow for a product marketplace, and it has also partnered with TransferWise; Starling Bank will be offering its users full current account functionality with a contactless MasterCard debit card also including international payment services. Source
N26 is a smartphone only bank that was originally launched in Germany and has big backers like Peter Thiel behind it; Vincent Haupert, a PhD student at the University of Erlangen-Nuernberg, told the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg how he and two colleagues found N26 security defenses riddled with holes that could have been used to defraud thousands of users; Haupert presented his findings to the bank and they have since stated that the issues found have been addressed. Source
Ron Shevlin digs into Square and why the company and its stock price continues to do very well; he looks...
Business Insider provides data on the number of challenger banks by country; this week Carrefour Banque, a subsidiary of Carrefour, that also operates a multinational retailer, shared that they were launching a new current account under the name C-Zam; the retailer operates in 30 countries and has over 1,000 stores in France which puts them in a unique position to acquire customers; other players prevalent in the French market include BNP Paribas which launched Hello Bank in 2013 and ING Direct which launched in 2010; startups Qonto and N26 also operate in Europe. Source
Sifted has done some interesting analysis on the founders of the top 10 leading digital banks in the UK; it...
K-Bank has gained authorization to open South Korea's first online bank; firm is an affiliate of Alibaba-owned Ant Financial; Kakao Bank is also involved in the final approval process to open the country's second online bank. Source
European digital bank N26 has increased its customer base by 200,000 users in just 14 months as digital bank solutions become increasingly more popular in Europe; the company has also reported a new transactions milestone of 3 billion euros ($3.1 billion); the Berlin-based company is targeting tech savvy millennials and has introduced a number of competitive features to attract new customers including a lending product that allows for mobile loans up to 25,000 euros ($26,556); the business has raised over $55 million in capital and is planning to expand to Britain in 2017. Source
Monzo and Revolut alerted customers of an outage due to a processing migration from a third party processor which caused customers to be unable to use cards for transactions; other digital banks affected by the third party processor migration included Starling Bank, Loot, Curve, Pockit and Uaccount; Monzo and Revolut have both reported they will reimburse customers for foreign exchange costs incurred as a result of the outage; Monzo says it has plans to move its processing to an internal unit with transactions processed on the firm's technology. Source