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Marcin Mazurek shares interesting financial insights on the major bank challengers in Europe.

A review of operations of major bank challengers after a year of significant challenges offers some interesting insights.

1.   Slower customer growth

The group of major* players representing top bank challengers in Europe (Revolut, N26, Monzo, Monese, Starling, TransferWise, Curve, and Tandem) served nearly 39 million customers as of Q4 2020 as compared to nearly 27 million as of Q4 2019. What is striking here is a fast decelerating customer growth. While the acquisition rate remained stable at above 100% p.a. on average between 2016 and 2019, the growth decelerated to “only” 46% in 2020.

What happened that the customer growth rate halved in just one year?

Incumbent banks catching up. Large financial institutions might be slow, but they keep improving their value proposition and gradually reduce the service/offer gap to challengers. This includes leveraging PSD2/open banking opportunities as well as various product fixes and eliminating key pain points which helps to prevent further loss of customers;

Key points include:

• Competition from incumbent financial institutions
• Changing needs of customers
• Falling valuation multiples

Read the full article, Back to Reality – Major bank challengers in Europe switch gears and focus on profitability, on LinkedIn.