Australia’s newest challenger bank 86 400 has just announced investment bank Morgan Stanley is going to help it kick of a private funding round worth more than $100m.
The investment bank is understood to have sent out details to both domestic and foreign interested investors for the round, according to the Financial Review.
It’s understood that this round is just the beginning as 86 400, named after how many seconds there are in a day, is looking to raise $250m to cover its first three years of operation. Apparently 86 400 is planning to raise half of that money now and the rest in 2020 or 2021.
The news of the investment comes just a few days after 86 400 announced it had acquired a licence to operate as an authorized deposit-taking institution in Australia.
The neobank will as an authorized deposit-taking institution be able accept unlimited deposits when it launches its transactions and savings accounts later this year.
However, 86 400 is not the only challenger bank to have entered Oz. Recently Xinja, Judo and Volt are all at different stages of setting up their operations Down Under.
In other challenger bank news, Atom bank has raised a £50m fundraising round to scale its technology and customer base.
Bridget Rosewell, chairman at Atom, said, “This latest raise recognizes the enormous progress that we have made on our journey to disrupt UK banking and is a clear signal of our investors’ support for our future plans.”
In the UK, challenger bank Metro Bank has confirmed that it is having “discussions regarding the potential sale of a loan portfolio”. These news comes after the a few hectic months for the bank. In January a serious accounting mistake led to its shares dropping by 40 per cent, shaving almost £800m of its value. Moreover, in May customers lined up outside some of Metro Bank’s offices to empty their accounts and safety deposit boxes after a rumour spread on WhatsApp, suggesting that people’s assets weren’t safe with the bank.
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