A few months ago I covered Number26, an excellent example of disruption in the banking space. Peter Thiel, no stranger to disruptive financial solutions, noticed what the company was doing and today they are announcing a €10 million Series A from Thiel’sValar Ventures.
Number26 is a European banking startup, itself enabled by Wirecare Bank, a German bank. What Number26 has done is to take the Wirecard service, and wrap it completely in order to deliver a completely new banking experience. If you were to take a traditional banking experience, you’d likely complain about it being hard to set up, having high fees and charges and being difficult to use in a mobile setting.
Number26 is the antithesis of this – a customer can set up a bank account in almost no time at all (the company says it takes a mere 8 minutes). Number26 charges no fees (account or credit card) and the company is very much mobile first. It even has a personal financial management (PFM) product integrated into its app.
As I said, Number26 is banking disruption writ large. So it makes sense that Thiel, himself an integral part in financial disruptors PayPal, Transferwise andXero , is backing the company. What is interesting is that it is Thiel’s first FinTech investment in Germany, and only the second in Europe (Transferwise being the other). Also participating in this round is Daniel Aegarter who tookTRADEX to one of the largest software exits in history.Existing investors Earlybird and Redalpine are also participating in this round.
The company has grown strongly – over 8,500 customers have signed up in the first two months that Number26 is in operation, on top of that 15,000 are on a waiting list to sign up.
Banking26 may or may not be the one that cracks the code on how banking should look in the future, but one thing is sure and that is that banking is going to be disrupted and solutions like Number26 show what the future of banking will start to look like.
