London fintech star Monzo is fending off one takeover offer each month

Monzo, one of London’s biggest fintech success stories, is fending off a takeover offer every month as larger rivals try to get their hands on a slice of its ultra-hip clientele, its co-founder has said.

Speaking on City A.M.’s Unregulated podcast, Tom Blomfield, who launched the company in April this year, said the firm has been approached by “big banks and big tech companies”, but has yet to accept an offer.

“It’s sort of flattering and you do the maths and think wow, that’s loads of money,” he said.

“But those kinds of acquisitions never really go well… They always say, ‘we’ll help you… realise your potential much much faster’.

“And it’s like, well yes. Or you’ll stick us in a basement and we’ll rot away and die because frankly you don’t really want to disrupt your own business models that much. Certainly not as much as we do. So let’s see you in 10 year’s time.”

Blomfield also said the high-profile outages the company has experienced were inevitable – but added its method of addressing them had encouraged sign-ups.

“It really ruins your day when you have to email 300,000 customers and apologise,” he said.

“[But] when it does happen you can either respond by trying to downplay it or hide it, or proactively warn everyone.

“The press we got [after its 12-hour outage over the summer] was phenomenal,” he added.

“Newspapers wrote about how we’d handled it and actually built trust and transparency. We had one of our biggest days of sign-ups the next day.”

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