“If you peel away the levels of bureaucracy, governance and crap around financial services, it’s really simple,” Tom Blomfield, CEO of Monzo, tells me from the challenger bank’s new office near London’s Old Street roundabout.
“It’s just been messed up by decades and decades of rubbish that the banks have layered on. So we were just trying to simplify it, pare it back, and deliver something that actually works for normal people.”
Transparency and simplicity is key to a new era of banking, the 31-year-old claims, and he’s excited to be a part of it.
Monzo, which has some £35m in funding under its belt, has attracted more than 100,000 users since its 2015 launch. It offers a pre-paid debit card users can load, manage and monitor via a smartphone app and, just last month, the firm was also granted its official banking licence by the UK government. Now, after years of preparation, Monzo is able to roll out customer current accounts....