Monzo is stepping up its offering for businesses, having taken note of increasing demand for business accounts and banking services.
The British challenger bank has announced a new premium plan for what it calls ‘bigger small businesses’. Christened ‘Team’, the plan covers payment approvals and expenses for business employees.
Its features include expenses cards, bulk payment management and payment approvals. Monzo cites data showing that 44% of businesses manually manage expenses, with the bank seeming to be identifying a product gap as a result of this.
The UK, like other developed nations, is home to an extensive small-and-medium sized (SME) business ecosystem of around 5.5 million. This will likely prove a solid customer base for Monzo, which has been making progress with business banking, though other banks will of course be targeting this sector.
“The 5.5 million SMEs in the UK are the backbone of the economy, yet they’ve been traditionally overlooked by banks,” said TS Anil, Monzo CEO.
“Business owners need game-changing products that take away unnecessary paperwork and allow them to get on with the important task of growing their business.”
Monzo was founded in 2015 and has quickly emerged as one of the UK’s leading challenger banks, or neobanks, building up a customer base of close to 11 million users. Along with fellow neobanks Starling and Chase, the company is receiving a good reception from UK customers, in comparison to some of the more traditional retail banks.
Businesses are becoming an increasing target for the company, however, which reported 400,000 business accounts in June. This figure has now risen to 500,000, according to the group’s latest update.
Monzo expects this growth with business accounts to continue, stating that one in six new UK businesses apply for one of its business accounts and that an enterprise joins its service every two minutes.
Anil continued: “As we scale beyond 500,000 business customers we’re still as focussed on staying close to our business community as we’ve always been and building features that do the heavy lifting as they focus on what really matters to them. Team is the next step in this journey, with plenty more to come.”