Revolut's next arch-nemesis hired a McKinsey alum as its CTO
While there's certainly a 'Big Three' of UK digibanks, there are plenty of other smaller and specialised fintechs in the space. Monument is a digibank focused on the "mass affluent," which is precisely the demographic Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky really wants to capture. And Monument just hired a new executive.
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Shaun Bohannon announced today he was joining Monument as its CTO, with the goal of providing high net-worth individuals a "private bank-like experience." He joined from Virgin Media O2, where he spent the last two years as digital CTO, but is also a McKinsey alum of eight years, serving as a senior director of software and cloud engineering at the consultancy.
Monument was founded in 2017 by Mintoo Bhandari, a former senior partner and managing director at asset management firm Apollo, where he ran the firm's Indian entities, AGM India Advisors and AION Capital Partners. It was co-founded by Vikash Gupta, a former director in Barclays' UK private bank. The firm's current CEO, Ian Rand, is another Barclays alum, formerly its CEO of Business Banking. Bohannon is ex-Barclays too, and also worked on Goldman Sachs' commodities electronic trading desk.
Bohannon joins at an interesting time. Monument will soon be going head-to-head with Revolut for those so-called 'mass affluent' clients. On the 20VC podcast last month, Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky said private banking is one of the areas of banking that he wants Revolut to get into the most, saying that "some [customers] have millions on our accounts." Revolut told Sifted last week that it is now building that private bank, but said it's "still early days" for the initiative.
Monument has some time to pull ahead, therefore, and Bohannon says the firm has already undergone "phenomenal growth" over the last two years. The most recent Companies House accounts for monument show that net interest income increase by almost ten times from 2022 to 2023, although total net losses were also up roughly 50%.
It's not just Monument's clients that are well off, its staff seem well compensated for a UK fintech too. In 2023, the firm had 85 employees and paid them an average of £117.7k ($143.8k) each. Since then, the firm's headcount appears to have exceeded 100 according to social media profiles of employees, with the firm hiring from banks like HSBC and fintechs like HyperJar.
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