Kia Ora!

Haven’t we had a busy little February!  

Things that piqued our interest:  

• Finch App is no more (although trying their hand at B2B payments 🤷). PFMs are a vitamin and the true meaning of Product/Market fit is when people pay for the product or service. No Pay = No PMF

• Revolut got another lot of funding to bring their valuation to whopping USD$5.5b (AUD$7.7b). Almost as much as CBA’s $8.6b in NET PROFIT AFTER TAX.

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ADI Market Share

Deposits

‍There’s still no movement in market share from the top end of town. But at the bottom end, Xinja has designed a brilliant value proposition and is truly changing our relationship with money and have got a huge MOM increase in balances as a result.

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Just jokes.

They bought balances with a super high (and potentially unsustainable) deposit interest at a time where interest rates have been at their lowest. Someone asked me the other day how Xinja are funding the interest. My response was that currently, investors are shouldering that burden.

I was going to do a bit of an overview of Basel iii; Deposit Loan Ratio; Capital Adequacy Ratio and some other boring stuff... but I genuinely have no interest in “banking”. Instead, I did a simple Interest Income vs. Interest Expense:

• Interest Income = approx. $000,000
• Interest Expense = approx $143,322
• Net = approx -$143,322

Even if they were able to lend 80% of their balances at 2.84% (same rate as Athena), they would have generated $144,723, leaving a full $1,401 in Gross Profit. Woosh.

Wonder if Volt are going to jump on that gravy train?

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Lending

‍Nothing really to report on the lending front. Judo still punching upwards and Numbers are steady as she goes. I really hope there is a lot to drawdown in their pipeline. Surely those socks got all the brokers over the line?!?

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Super disappointed to see Credit Cards didn’t hold on to some of their December gains. From an industry perspective of course, I’m glad everyone is getting out of debt 😬

Personally, I see this as both a challenge and an opportunity.

There are also some non-ADI Credit Card issuers out there like Flexi and Latitude, who could be fairing better.

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We’ve included other Personal Lending (like Personal Loans 🤔) to see if the banks were able to maintain the balances at a customer level but shift it on to a fixed term. ‘No’ is the answer to that.

Why is no one talking about the erosion of other Personal Lending? Still, in an environment when the market is declining, Westpac are doing the best.

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Category Teardown

Instead of doing the full categories, we are cherry picking some brands and going deeeeeper. To celebrate their raise and announcement of their local team, we take a look at the FinTech golden child: Revolut (we already had planned to do Revolut, so purely coincidental.... but we’ll take it!)

Unsurprisingly, most of their traffic is coming from the UK and Europe (mainly Poland). With 2.3m unique visitors per month globally, they have a very strong platform to build from, particularly as they have announced plans to turn some of these users into revenue through lending.

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On top of our usual social performance, we have a look at what socials are driving the most traffic. Facebook and YouTube are head and shoulders above - although most likely due to advertising than any engaging organic output.

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In the report, we have broken down marketing tactics and their effectiveness across Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.  

It’s relatively simple to assume the world is caught up in the challenger banks coming out of the mother country (UK 🙄), but they don’t seem to be getting many eyeballs on their sites from the US.

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If you would like something like this done for you (or your competitors 😜), get in touch. We love this stuff!

Until next month ✌️

DC

p.s. feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and give us a follow 🙏

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Full Report

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