When the first challenger banks hit the market in the early to mid-2010s, nobody had experienced anything like them before.
Account opening in under 48 hours? No queues or paper forms to fill in? Instant payment notifications on your phone?
Woah! Where do I sign up?
The landscape is very different in 2020.
In the UK, one in four people under 37 now use a challenger bank. And the global challenger bank market worth is on its way to reaching $578 billions by 2027.
But like traditional banks, not all challengers have progressed at the same pace or meet the high bar the trailblazers set almost a decade ago. So we started asking ourselves: who are the leaders? And, more importantly, what has propelled them to the front of the pack?
Our Battle of the Challenger Banks series is an attempt to answer these questions.
We’ll be using our market intelligence platform
Ready to dive in?
But, wait a second.
Who are these challengers we speak of? What makes them “challengers” as opposed to traditional banks?
We had a pretty heated discussion at Scientia HQ. But we finally settled on a few criteria.
For us, a challenger bank is:
Challenger banks do what traditional banks do, except they promise to do it better, faster, and more transparently. They’re more accessible and offer a smoother user experience. They have clear fee structures. And their savings and investment products tend to have higher interest rates than what you’d get from traditional banks.
In short, challenger banks work hard to make banking a pleasure, instead of an experience you break out in a cold sweat just thinking about.
We’ve picked six prize fighters to kick off our battle of the challengers. They are:
Monzo — the UK’s most popular challenger bank and home to over 50% of the UK neobank market’s customers
N26 — Berlin-based challenger founded in 2013
Revolut — best-known for its incredibly low exchange rates; Revolut now operates in the EEA, Switzerland, Canada, the US, Australia, Japan, and Singapore
Starling — the only challenger on this list to offer both personal and business bank accounts free of charge
Monese — Founder Norris Koppel created Monese in 2015 when he learned he couldn’t open a bank account because, as someone new to the UK, he didn’t have local proof of address
bunq — Billed the “bank of the free”, bunq lets you invest money in ethical funds and plant trees to offset your carbon footprint
We'll be adding more Challengers to our list as we go.
We’ll be running our challengers through our digital research platform,
We’ll focus on:
So here we are.
The stage is set, and the contestants are all lined up and raring to go. It’s time for the first round: customer onboarding and e-KYC checks.
Who is going to snag the win?
Do you wanna see where get our data? See how you stand in the market and where your competitors are? Request
Ready to go into battle? Read more about the ongoing battles below.
Here’s the US edition