GoCardless Founder Tom Blomfield’s New Startup Is A “Full Stack” Mobile-First Bank
TECHCRUNCH: We already knew that GoCardless co-founder Tom Blomfield was working on a new U.K. banking startup, but now, thanks in part to a noisy series of Tweets from investors, developers and the company’s own Twitter account, more details have emerged. Dubbed Mondo, the startup is described as a “full stack” and mobile-first bank, in reference to the fact that it isn’t simply a mobile app piggybacking existing banking software or an existing bank in order to offer a better User Experience. Instead, my understanding is that the company’s plans and accompanying technology is considerably more ambitious.
In addition to applying for a full banking licensein its own right — meaning that it will be able to generate revenue through lending out bank deposits — Mondo is busy writing its own full stack banking software from scratch.
This is enabling the company to create what Blomfield calls on his LinkedIn profile a “smart” bank, with features that aren’t always possible simply by plugging into legacy banking software and infrastructure that often dates as far back as the 1970s.
In screenshots shared on Twitter by Elieen Burbidge — a partner at London VC firm Passion Capital, who TechCrunch has learned is Mondo’s sole seed investor, having signed a term sheet “in the millions” and completed an investment in April this year — we can see a number of the banking app’s cutting-edge features. These include realtime reporting of withdrawals, geolocation-marked transactions, and peer-to-peer payments.
