Is Monzo the Facebook of banking?

It is a truly unusual thing - a bank young people are excited about. But while its speed and ease of use are impressive, there is a problem - it's not making money

A letter from the bank tends to arouse dread. In these mostly paperless days, it usually means you've gone overdrawn again or the interest rate on your savings account has moved even closer to zero. Best not open it now; stick it on the pile for later-slash-never. But when my new Monzo bank card landed on the doormat one morning, I felt a frisson of excitement. Perhaps it was the six-week waiting list: there were 66,000 people ahead of me in the queue when I applied. Maybe it was just the hot pink debit card, the millennial's answer to the black Amex.

Monzo, a smartphone-only "challenger" bank, has this effect on a lot of people. In its first round of crowdfunding, in March 2016, it raised 1m in 96 seconds, the fastest crowdfunding campaign ever. In a more recent campaign, the singer Tom Odell and Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, came on board as investors and the company raised 70m. Wired magazine asked if Tom Blomfield, Monzo's 32-year-old British founder and chief executive, would become "the Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg of banking".

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