A growing customer base and investor interest is driving a strong performance for Monzo, with the challenger bank reporting growth in terms of both revenue and profit.
The London-based fintech reported 2.5x its 2023 revenues at the close of the financial year on 31 March 2024, with the figure standing at £889m. This in turn drove a pre-tax profit of $15.4m against a loss of £116.3m in FY2023.
This marks the company’s first full financial year of profitability nine years after it first began business back in 2015. Its success has primarily been driven by the expansion of its customer base, although this has also attracted significant investment interest.
“This was a landmark year of record growth for Monzo,” said TS Anil, CEO of Monzo.
“We surpassed nine million personal customers and 400,000 business customers, launched game-changing new products, closed a £500m capital raise and, as planned, reported our first year of profitability.”
Monzo has built up a customer base of 9.7 million, with 2.3 million joining in 2023. This included 200,000 business customers, giving Monzo a stronger position in the business banking sector.
The firm first got its full banking licence in 2017, having operated under a restricted bank licence for its first two years of activity. Monzo is now the UK’s seventh largest bank, recording growth for customer deposits of 88% to £11.2bn last year, as well as an 84% uptick in lending activity to £1.4bn.
Monzo expects its growth to continue throughout the rest of 2024, particularly regarding customer numbers. The firm projects that its customer-base will reach 11 million by the end of the year, driven by its international growth plans.
The UK remains “at the centre of its near-term growth plans”, Monzo stressed, but it has plans to expand in the US under a new leadership team and is opening an office in Dublin to kickstart its European expansion.
Anil continued: “I’ve never believed in the idea that a company has to choose between either being mission-oriented or focused on business outcomes.
“FY2024 proved Monzo is doing both – and that our strategy of placing the customer at the heart of everything we do is working at scale. We’ve achieved scale, growth and profitability, and we have all the right components to seize the huge opportunity ahead.”
As stated above, Monzo continues to attract investor interest. The second half of 2023 and first half of 2024 has seen the company complete a funding round of $430m/£500m led by Google parent company Alphabet, and is reportedly set to receive an investment from the Government Investment Corporation (GIC), the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore.
