Investing

If I wanted to invest in Mondo, are you currently taking investors and/or where would I go for more information?

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Hey Bobby, we’re not taking investors right now :slight_smile: We’d love to do another round of crowdfunding in the future though and we’ll keep you all up to date about that!

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I wasn’t specifically talking about crowd funding but a larger sum.

You were allowed to invest up ÂŁ1000 in return for shares

After having just spent a week with Mondo, I’d love to have the opportunity to invest! Alphas/beata’s should get priority :smile:

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If you do another round are you able to offer it to existing card holders first or is that it allowed? I’d love to invest @tristan.

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I suggest instead of considering incorporating an element of crowdfunding into the post-bank licence fund raise, mondo should offer up the whole amount to crowdfunding. The amount of buzz you would generate if you took on 10,000 small investors would propel you above number26’s user count and put you in pole position among the world’s digital challenger banks. If you just shipped out a placement to a couple of big investors/institutions, you wouldn’t get any growth momentum out of it.

While the 96 second raise was great publicity, thousands of potential brand evangelists were missed out on or put in a queue for next time, many of whom are being snapped up by lesser challengers like tandem. If you brought them all on board as a priority and offered up any unfilled funding amount to those big investors who all want a chunk, i think your next year’s growth will have been hacked.

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I’d be interested to do this too. If like Tom said the features will be the same or better for the actual bank launch then I can see mondo doing very well in future.

I’d be interested in hearing more about it before hand too.

while I agree with a lot of the comment regarding promotional opportunities with crowd funding, the problem I can see with “small” investors is you don’t know how many will take up the offer until the funding round is out there for all to see and judge the take up after it is offered, which could enhance the Company, or trash it by the volume of uptake.

Mondo took the gamble last time and it paid off because of the 96 second uptake - a record uptake - with the next round funding of £5-10 million if they “only” get interest of small investors for £1-2 million like Tandem did, the investors required for the remaining £4-8 million would be in a much stronger position and could demand a greater stake.

IBT suggests that there is a 5m euro limit on crowd funding as well (???) - see here about Tandems crowd fund where there were some large investors in their crowd fund that put in ÂŁ100K+ stakes in the first 10 seconds - good timing or luck (??) :wink: http://uk.businessinsider.com/5-investors-filled-85-of-startup-bank-tandems-initial-crowdfunding-round-2016-5

Which just goes to show how open and fair Mondo were being with their previous crowd fund limits of ÂŁ1K/ investor giving as many investors a chance of getting reasonable stake in Mondo

I do however agree with the promotional buzz of offering a certain amount of the next funding round to the “general public” would be great - I don’t think offering the whole amount to crowd funding would be a gamble worth taking, or in fact legal according to IBT on EU rules - Its a difficult decision for the co founders.

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Brewdog is a good example of solely crowdfunding massive amounts of investment on crowdcube at strong valuations. They now have 42,000 investors and most of the people in their bars can be traced back to being sold into the brand by one of those brand ambassadors. They have incentivised their customers to feel passion for their brand and each investor will tell 10, 20, 50 people about how that brand is the best. With 42,000 customers ranting and raving about your brand growth is the only outcome.

If mondo put up ÂŁ10m with a cap of ÂŁ10k per investor, that is 1000 investors of ÂŁ10k, or more realistically 10,000 investors of 1k average. That it very achievable around the ÂŁ50-100m post money valuation

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Just seen ian’s updated post. Was unaware of a limit so perhaps it is not feasible to offer all to the crowd. Should definitely include all the people who want to invest this time though.

lol I did a lot of updating !

Crowdfunding a bank was a great novel (?) idea to raise its profile - hats off to Mondo for thinking of it before other banks

Crowdfunding seems to be a bit of a minefield - Im not sure IBT is correct in saying its an EU law limiting crowdfunding to 5m Euro - It seems these limits are set by individual nations the FCA controls our limits I think at 5m euro - about ÂŁ3.5m.

The management of a crowd fund offer must take a lot of Mondos time which could possibly be used more productively ?

Mondo may also run into FCA rules requiring certification of individuals as being either a “sophisticated investor” or “high net worth investor” before allowing the investment, once it gets into larger investment amounts.

It did increase brand awareness undoubtably - I would love to see the unlucky ones from last round get their investment in this time - perhaps a ÂŁ500 limit to increase the take up ? perhaps ÂŁ1.5m to also increase the take up ? perhaps exclude original investors - which I am one, to be fair to the others ?

Mondo would know far better at what level to set the limit at - the average investment last time was about ÂŁ550 / person - were there a lot of people that invested ÂŁ100 ? and a few that invested ÂŁ1000 ?

There was a blog post about the sizes of investments in the crowdfund. https://getmondo.co.uk/blog/2016/03/03/crowdfunded/

There’s a pretty even split between £1000, £500, £100 and £10 investors and a dotting around of other amounts.

If there was a higher cap on investment you would find that some of those £1k investors would be £5k, £20k, £50k or much bigger investors. E.g. Sugru had someone casually invest £1million. Tandem did not have an investment cap and there were massive investments being made of hundreds of thousands. They raised over £2m even though they were valuing themselves at around 3x mondo’s valuation, despite copying mondo’s strategy and being without any product or proper business plan or projections. Any curious investors were told they would need to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement to receive any of the proper information that you would expect on crowdcube. But it was seedrs.

Sorry going off topic here, what i was trying to say is that it’s wrong to assume crowdfunding is for small fish… mondo made it for small fish only in the first raise but if they welcomed the sharks and whales they would join in. Crowd funding doesn’t take that much effort as you are paying them to do everything for you, from legal aspects to sending share certificates . You just need someone on investor relations to answer q’s during the raise and afterwards. Having thousands of investors stands you in good stead for becoming a much bigger company.

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Or what they could do to involve as many investors as possible but prevent large anonymous stakeholders (which may be a major concern) is increase the investment cap over time. E.g monday max 1k, tues 2.5k, weds 5k, thurs 25k, friday 50k. ÂŁ10m would be filled within the first few days and if not then certainly in the last two.

I think i am over thinking this as they have not even confirmed there will be any further crowdfunding. But it’s good to get thoughts out there. If there is any company happy to listen to rambling ideas it is mondo, and i appreciate that. :smile:

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If you look at the highly successful fund raise by Go Henry recently you will see they offered to existing members only the weekend before it went live on crowdfunding. This was highly successful and subsequently lead to overfunding to the maximum allowed by the documented offer of ÂŁ3.9m which was nearly double their initial target they were aiming for.

They could have got far more if not for the restrictions on the investment limits.
A great social and members campaign was run and I believe if you ran a similar but larger fund raise it would be very successful. Individuals not institutions owning a bank is far more appealing to most customers now and if you were run a customer panel alongside the board and management team then you would have the potential for a very positive outcome.

Keep it up loving the development so far.

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