spotlight: digital banking
IBS Journal September 2015
Mondo: time for a new kind of bank
Mondo, a new digital bank hoping to launch in the UK next year, will focus on current accounts and short/medium term lending. It is underpinned by a custom built solution, front-to-back office, which is based on the open source technologies used by the likes of Amazon, Google and Netflix.
Mondo, set up by the former execs from another start-up, Starling Bank, boldly states on its website that ‘it is time for a new kind of bank’, the bank that makes life easier and ‘belongs on our smartphone, not on the high street’. What is its proposition that sustains these claims? ‘We are going to be focused purely on
current accounts and provide overdraft lending and personal financing,’ states Tom Blomfield, CEO of Mondo. ‘Everyone has a horror story about their bank’, he says, be it a tiny overdraft for an hour that has resulted in a hefty penalty and charge from the bank, or a card blocked abroad and not being able to reach the bank in out of office hours, or being stung by hidden fees and charges. Mondo wants to offer a current account that is free and has no hidden charges, with the customer being fully up-to-date on the transactions thanks to ‘a genuine real-time processing system’. Customers will be issued with a Mastercard debit card and the bank will not charge the FX fees when the card is used abroad. ‘We really like the idea of telcos offering their customers unlimited data and other services for a small daily fee when they are abroad,’ muses Blomfield. ‘If we applied this to our bank, a customer could have unlim- ited use of their card abroad for a couple of pounds a day, for example. We are thinking about this option.’ Mondo will have no ‘brick and mortar’ branches and everything will be done via a
50 © IBS Intelligence 2015
www.ibsintelligence.com
smartphone/tablet. ‘These days, big banks spend more money on maintaining their branches than large technology compa- nies do on their R&D,’ he comments. ‘Banks are stuck in the 1960s whilst the rest of the world has moved on.’ Amazon Prime offers a one-hour delivery service, yet the banks are still sending out paper statements that take days to arrive, ‘relying on hidden fees and charges’. Mondo will provide a real- time view of customer spending and alert customers in real time, he says. The bank’s team of developers is work-
ing on creating native apps for Android and iOS. As for classic online banking, ‘we are undecided, we do not know wheth- er we even need a website for a desktop’, Blomfield says. Mondo’s customers are likely to be predominantly using their tab- lets and phones for banking, so the main focus is on the native apps packed with useful features ‘to make life easier’. The use of geo-location, for instance, means that as a customer arrives abroad, the app picks it up automatically and sends a relevant push/notification message (similar to those of mobile operators). The customer will be fully informed in advance about any charg- es and will also be assured that the card is not going to be blocked. Other timely notifications might include letting a customer know that they are low on credit, ‘and it is fair of a bank to let customers know this before they go overdrawn, not after’, Blomfield feels. This
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56
