Recently, Monzo, a British digital bank, announced that it had completed an additional financing of US $100 million. It was reported that Tencent participated in the investment.
Founded in 2015, Monzo is a new type of bank based on mobile applications, providing account opening, management, deposit, lending and other services. Before the additional financing, Monzo's new round of financing has reached 500 million dollars, led by the Abu Dhabi Development Fund, and its valuation after investment has reached 4.5 billion dollars.
In 2021, Tencent made a lot of investments overseas. According to the Financial Times, there were 36 overseas investments in the first half of the year alone, which grew rapidly compared with 4 in the same period of 2020 and 3 in the same period of 2019. Investing in games, finance, health care and other industries, involving Europe, the Americas, Southeast Asia and other regions, can be said to blossom in many places. According to public reports, some financial technology enterprises invested by Tencent in 2021 include German Digital Bank N26, Singapore Digital Bank Tyme, German investment platform Scalable Capital, Dutch stock trading platform BUX and Argentine financial management application Ual á.
According to Altfi data,From the perspective of monthly active users, Monzo will be the first digital bank in the UK in 2020. However, affected by the epidemic blockade, Monzo suffered a net loss of 130 million pounds (about 175 million dollars) in 2020, 13% more than that in 2019. In 2021, Monzo also heard a lot of negative news. He was investigated by the Financial Conduct Authority of the United Kingdom on suspicion of violating the anti money laundering law, and took the initiative to withdraw the bank license application in October.
Monzo's performance rebounded in 2021. Monzo said that its revenue would double in 2021, with a quarter coming from new products such as Monzo senior accounts and corporate accounts. The number of users also increased significantly, exceeding 5 million in total, with a monthly growth of 100000. It is reported that Monzo also plans to develop new products such as buy before pay (BNPL) and retail investment platform.
Other digital banks in the UK include Starling, Revolut, Atom Bank, etc. Starling raised 370 million dollars in January 2021, with a valuation of 1.9 billion dollars; In July 2021, Revolut obtained the financing led by Softbank Vision Fund Phase II and Tiger Global Management, with a valuation of $33 billion.
Tencent's massive overseas investment last year was seen by the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and other media as a response to the situation of anti-monopoly and strong supervision. Recently, the news that Tencent has successively reduced its shareholding in JD and Donghai Group has attracted much attention,The latter even led to the collective decline of Tencent stocks。 In the new year, whether Tencent will continue to maintain the pace of overseas investment and pay attention to whether the industry will change may not only affect Tencent.
Article | Shi Yi
Editor | Zhao Xiaochun
Fig. | Unsplash
