Paul Pester, the former TSB Bank chief executive, is joining Britain’s fintech frenzy by launching the first UK-based social networking app enabling friends and family members to share money.
Sky News has learnt that Mr Pester has teamed up with Anthony Thomson, the Metro Bank and Atom Bank founder, and former CompareTheMarket chief Matthew Donaldson to set up Loop, which began a period of beta-testing last week.
City sources said that Loop had raised a round of seed funding from a group of wealthy investors, and was now preparing for a larger Series A fundraising to take place in early 2022.
Mr Pester and his co-investors are understood to have identified a growing trend of informal money-sharing among friends and family valued at more than £12.5bn annually in the UK alone.
The trend has grown significantly during the pandemic, with millions of people on furlough and greater uncertainty in the jobs market, while lockdown restrictions made meeting friends and family members more difficult.
At the same time, cash usage has dwindled dramatically, with online money transfer services soaring in popularity.
Loop’s pitch to investors is said to have been predicated on the fact that this area of consumer finance is not supported by banks or the wave of app-based neobanks which have emerged over the last decade, such as Monzo, Starling Bank or Zopa.
The launch of Loop will represent Mr Pester’s most publicly visible commercial venture since he left TSB in 2018 after an IT meltdown that he said had left the bank “on its knees”.
A subsequent inquiry into the crisis, which left millions of customers with no access to their accounts for weeks, laid the blame at the door of the TSB board and that of its Spanish parent, Banco Sabadell.
Since then, Mr Pester has become chair of the campaign group Fairer Finance’s advisory board, and has advised private equity groups including KKR and Pollen Street Capital on investments in the financial services sector.
Mr…
Source : skynews
