Posted on May 8, 2020 at 11:40 AM

5 Top Fintech Companies to Watch in the UK

The fintech industry in the UK continues to be a thriving and exciting area. It is second only to the US fintech market as the most profitable and successful in the world. This is largely due to the regulatory support there is for open banking, the UK’s financial expertise and the increasing number of customers voting with their feet and hands and steering clear of the incumbent, traditional banks in favour of new challenger option.

If you want to know who to watch in 2020, take a look at nowloan.co.uk’s guide to the top 5 fintech companies in the UK.

Starling Bank

A challenger bank based only online, Starling Bank is causing disruption among the traditional banking institutes through technology and innovation. It was established in the UK by Anne Boden in 2017 and just recently reached the impressive milestone of having 1 million registered users, meaning it’s enjoying the same kind of expansion and growth as Monzo. Last year it won prestigious awards like Best Current Account and Best British Bank and according to the company’s reports, it is heading towards achieving profitability by December. Something you don’t see with these challenger banks.

Monzo

Slightly ahead of Starling Bank, but only just, Monzo is considered to be one of the most popular of so-called neobanks. More than 3,437,886 people are registered users. That figure pales in comparison to the startling admission by the company that 40,000 people every week open an account through Monzo. Online banking as we know it is continually disrupted by Monzo with every new addition and update, including the salary sorter. This allows you to categorise your money into groups such as spending, bills and savings so that you never overspend.

The user-friendly app and its isrupt right now and make money later’ are what sets it apart from so many of its rivals.

Thought Machine

Thought Machine was first founded in London by a group of 4 former Google employees back in 2014. The team spent 2 years following its inception developing its main banking platform, ValutOS, which is now being branded as just Vault. After that, the company made several partnerships with highly esteemed big players such as Lloyds Banking Group, Atom Bank and IBM, with Lloyds investing £11m in 2018 for 10% of the company.

Vault is designed to be native to the cloud, making it cheap and easy to scale quickly as its customer base grows. This means it will never require large operations teams or pricey data centres to keep a strong infrastructure in place. Although it doesn’t run on Azure, it does run on IBM Cloud, Google Cloud Platform and AWS.

Wagestream

Wagestream exists to disrupt the payday loan sector of the industry. This fintech start-up based in London gives employees the chance to access pre-agreed advances on their monthly salaries for a standard flat rate of £1 through the company’s online portal. The company charges its employees 50 every month so that they can benefit from this special facility. The restaurant chain Carluccio’s, Slug & Lettuce pubs, Camden Town Brewery and David Lloyd gyms are noted, customers.

Revolut

In its earliest days, Revolut was simply a clever wallet app that helped its customers to send and receive money in other currencies other than GBP without succumbing to hideous fees. Now, though, it offers a little bit of this, a little bit of that. With metal cards, cryptocurrency, budgeting and saving, business and personal finance all being catered for.