They recently bought a big chunk of marketinvoice as well. That business has a disruptive model which could cannibalise Barclays’ margins, so they are taking the bull by the horns by investing and partnering with them.
I can’t help but feel like there’s an elephant in the room though, or should I say unicorns in the room. For the last 5-10 years all the big banks have been dismissive of fintech and now they can’t really afford what they want to buy. That is - Monzo, Revolut and N26.
Instead they are just partnering with tiny little sandbox developers and getting a few headlines, but will millions of people be using Bink in a couple of years time?
I think 1 or 2 of the FinTechs will survive and carve out a small portion of the pie, but once the legacy banks have most of the big attractions (decent app, instant notifications, 3rd party integrations) etc, it makes the “sell” of a relatively small, quite new “challenger bank”, that much harder.