The Monday Roundup: what we are watching this week | April 4th

By Gaia Lamperti

The Monday Roundup sets the scene for the week’s biggest news stories, industry deals, and upcoming events. For Prime subscribers only.

Neobanks wins and losses

Zopa bank has hit profitability, just 21 months after acquiring its banking licence, making it one of the fastest digital banks to achieve profitability ever. The past year has been a highly successful one for Zopa bank as it has exceeded targets across new and existing products and raised $300 million led by Softbank to fuel our accelerated growth. Since launching in 2020, the company has attracted £1 billion in deposits, more than £1 billion of loans on its balance sheet, issued circa 250,000+ credit cards becoming a top 5 credit card issuer in the UK.

Italy’s central bank has banned German digital bank N26 from onboarding new customers after checks last year flagged money laundering risks. This is not the first time N26 has come under fire for its lax anti-money laundering (AML) procedures, and the digital bank has been facing heightened scrutiny from German regulatory authorities over the past two years. But the bank is trying to solve the controversy. “N26 Bank has taken a number of actions to remedy these shortcomings,” the Bank of Italy said in a statement. “The Bank of Italy reserves the right to assess [if] the anomalies have been fully overcome, before considering revising the current decision.”

News in Payments

Apple is working to bring a host of financial services work, including payments processing, in-house to reduce its reliance on outside fintech partners, reports Bloomberg. The tech giant has embarked on a multi-year plan, called ‘Breakout’, that would see it do payments processing, loan risk assessments, fraud analysis, credit checks and customer service work on its own. Last week, Apple has quietly acquired UK credit bureau Credit Kudos, which uses open banking technology to deliver finely-tuned credit scores.

Santander has enabled its SME and corporate clients in Spain to make immediate international payments to recipients in Brazil, through its One Trade solution. As part of PagoNxt’s Trade business unit, the One Trade solution will allow international transfers to be completed in minutes, allowing senders to comply with FX documentation requirements, while the recipients are spared from closing or signing local FX contracts. Santander is the first European bank to launch a payments solution that allows customers to make real-time transfers into Brazil in local currency.

Where is the buzz

The FCA‘s new rules and guidance on operational resilience for financial services firms came into force last week. These will see organisations across the sector have to identify important areas of their business and ensure that they can continue functioning during any disruption.

“In line with new regulations, firms must have identified any vulnerabilities in their operational resilience, as well as set impact tolerances for the maximum tolerable disruption, and carried out mapping and testing to a level of sophistication necessary to do so,” told us Guy Warren, CEO of tech firm ITRS Group.

“However, that doesn’t mean that firms have to have perfect operational resilience by today. A three-year transitional period means that firms have until 31^st March 2025 before the regulator expects them to be operating consistently within the impact tolerances they have set – but they are expected to be sufficiently prepared for such disruptions, be able to respond effectively, and restore services efficiently.”