Are subscriptions the new Fintech standard?

October 26, 2020

Also:

📱Vipps starting a mobile plan

👩 The gender gap in investing

🤖 Big tech still interested in finance

😬 Are subscriptions the new Fintech standard?

The danish challenger bank Lunar (former Lunarway), has raised 438 million NOK and plans to employ 20 people in Norway . The round was raised right after their Pro subscription for both regular users and business accounts. Lunar states that next on their roadmap is credit products tailored for the Norwegian market.

The pro subscription for business accounts put Lunar partly in competition with Folio, helping businesses keep track of expenses and receipts. This week Folio raised 12 million NOK. Folio also leverages a subscription model costing 69 NOK a month.

This week the British Neobank Monzo also announced their Premium subscription costing £15 per month. What you pay for? Travel and phone insurance, 1.5 percent interest on balances up to £2 000, and a white metal card allegedly costing £50 each to produce! Users who opt-in for a card will be locked into Premium membership for six months to cover the production costs.

There certainly seems to be a trend for neobanks to charge subscriptions for their services even though traditional banks earn most of their money from credit. Interesting how all this will pan out considering "subscription fatigue" is becoming more pronounced, with 47 percent of consumers saying it causes frustration. Altfi has written a comparison on the battle for premium subscribers among the largest neobanks in the UK.

📱Vipps starting a mobile plan

  • Do Vipps have strong pressure from the board to make money?

  • Is this because you are avoiding your owners' core business?

  • What does this say about Vipps strategy moving on?

  • Aren't you running a significant brand risk with this?

  • Could this become a conflict of interest with your clients?

Let's say that Garborgs answers prove that he could be a great politician.

👩 The gender gap in investing

Robinhood has released a report about the state pof women investors today . Some of the key findings are that about half of the female respondents haven't invested because they don't feel they make enough money to invest, and the main reason for not investing is because they don't know where to start. On a related note, DNB reports that almost half of all fund purchases now go through their savings app and that they currently are close to equality in customers' fund savings.

Speaking of stocks: Some companies, like McDonald's, offers a free item voucher to every investor in its annual report. A new app called Stockperks tries to compile all shareholder rewards provided by publicly traded companies into one centralized database. This is an exciting trend, turning retail investors into brand ambassadors - kind of the opposite of what we talked about a few weeks ago with Stash's Stock-Back® rewards program.

🤖 Big tech still interested in finance

This week Google released Lending DocAI, a machine learning mortgage processing tool that aims to speed up mortgage applications. This is probably mostly for the American market, but it is interesting to see that Google dabbles in this field. The digital lending platform Roostify is already using this in production.

As a side note, Amazon has launched a program to pay consumers for their data on non-Amazon purchases. The program asks users to send in 10 receipts per month for any purchases made at non-Amazon retailers, earning a 10$ reward applied to their Amazon Balance. Who knew that your receipts could be this valuable?

🙏 Don't keep it a secret!

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Marius Hauken, partner Stacc X