Chime, the San Francisco-based bank popular with millennials, now has one million customers and has just closed a $70 million financing round overseen by Menlo Ventures taking the company’s value to $500 million. Other new players to the scene like Revolut have joined the ranks of the unicorns by providing banking services to a globetrotting clientele without investing a penny in advertising. Germany’s N26 now has one million customers, with plans to reach five million by 2020, while Estonian outfit TransferWise, in the black for the last year, has more than two million, employing more than nine hundred people.
What these enfant terribles of the banking scene have in common is that they provide an increasingly complete range of banking services, satisfying the needs of the tech savvy and that as soon as they can, become fully fledged banks. You can choose to classify them as fintech or as “new banks”, particularly considering that some of them are actively pursuing banking licenses in several countries. Meanwhile, the traditional banks are worried, unable as they are to compete with these lean, mean, fit machines. Furthermore: for…
