NEOBANKS: NICHE BANKING A new order: Monument takes its name from the City of London landmark
Alandmark landmarkmoment moment Monument estimates there are more than three million professional people in the UK with £200billion on deposit, many underwhelmed by the service they receive from mainstream banks. Rhea Chatterjee, Head of People, looks at how the neo kept calm and carried on building during a crisis and how it’s about to turn their fortunes around
Who builds a new bank in the midst of a global pandemic? To be fair, it wasn’t part of the plan for Monument Bank. But, given the neo takes its name from a City of London landmark that bears witness to a destructive event (the Great Fire of London) from which a new order emerged, the timing was apt. The concept of a niche neo for a cash-rich, professional class that has somehow got lost in the cracks between wealth management for the fabulously well-endowed and mainstream banking for the averagely well-off, had appealed to investors when it was pitched ahead of the recent crisis. A £28million funding round in February 2020 was backed by VCs and angels including Ian Axe, former CEO at Panmure Gordon, Eric Zinterhofer, a founding partner of private equity firm www.fintechf.com
Searchlight Capital, Rakesh Loonkar, a cybersecurity entrepreneur, and high-profile property developer Harry Handelsman. They all saw sense in offering the UK’s three-and-a-half million or so doctors, lawyers, accountants, entrepreneurs and investors – with whom many of them, no doubt, mixed – a bespoke way to make the most of their liquid assets. Monument’s idea was to offer higher-than-average interest-bearing accounts that could be leveraged by the bank to fund loans specifically for those who wanted to build property portfolios. Many of its potential clients, whom it estimates have £200billion on deposit, are likely already active in the residential buy-to-let market – one that Savills says was worth $1.338trillion by the summer of 2021. Rents, yields, property values and
buy-to-let lending all rose in the first seven months of the year, making bricks and mortar as attractive as they’ve ever been. The concept of a using deposits to power lending might be a traditional banking model, but Monument’s execution is most definitely post-modern. It combines a native Cloud-based digital core, mobile user interface and direct access to real relationship managers, to deliver skilled investment support. Mambu, Salesforce, Amazon Web Services, Persistent Systems and Accenture were brought in for the build in 2020 – a particular challenge, since the teams were rarely physically in the same place due to COVID restrictions. Many of the bank’s target demographic also, of course, found themselves forced into unfamiliar ways of working during the pandemic – cut off from normal interaction with clients, patients, and colleagues. Issue 9 | ThePaytechMagazine
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