CRYPTO Lightbulb moment: Ziglu is giving customers what they want,and that’s crypto
BuildingZiglu Building Ziglu Ziglu offers accounts that treat crypto like any other currency. Is this what the next wave in financial services looks like? Founder Mark Hipperson talks ‘neo v2.0’ with Joanne Dewar, CEO of GPS Launching a successful challenger is all about opportunity, means and execution. If your burning desire is to launch a crypto-native neobank in the UK, then all those things might take a little bit longer to come to fruition. But that time has come for Ziglu. Founded by Mark Hipperson, former chief technology officer and co-founder of Starling Bank, Ziglu is a personal money app, offering an account, card and simple way to buy and sell crypto. Hipperson had kept an eye on crypto developments while building Starling, the UK’s first licensed challenger to offer a current account, but which doesn’t – as yet – include crypto facilities. In fact, few of the first wave of
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UK challenger banks do. Revolut, Monzo (and N26 before its departure from the UK) have extended some functionality to account holders, but they are a long way from treating it as mainstream. Ziglu, on the other hand, has developed a truly global account for the digital age, one where users can manage traditional and digital currency all in one place, enjoy competitive and instant cryptocoin exchange services, and will soon be able to use a Mastercard debit card to spend whichever of four currencies Ziglu currently supports – Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ethereum (ETH) and Litecoin (LTC). It’s challenging the challengers. “We all know the big banks have been ripping us off and letting us down for
years. Starling Bank tried to fix that and I think we did a pretty good job of changing people’s attitudes… but a lot has changed in the last five years,” says Hipperson in his pitchdeck message to crowdfunders who went on to help Ziglu smash its target raise in a matter of hours in September. It was over-funded, infact, by 500 per cent. Hipperson had clearly caught the zeitgeist. “We’re a modern financial services challenger that does crypto as well, because that’s what a modern financial services company needs to do,” he says. “I’m not an evangelist for cryptocurrency; all I’m doing is providing a service to people because they’ve asked for it. And I want to try to provide something that doesn’t rip them off. www.fintechf.com