Fintech startups amass war chests for the economic downturn – TechCrunch

Consumer fintech startups were massively successful in 2019, attracting millions of new users and disrupting traditional retail banks and financial services with mobile-first, consumer-oriented products. Despite the economic downturn in public markets and the massive wave of cuts at public and private companies in recent weeks, fintech startups have been raising a ton of money.

It feels like they’re all building a war chest to survive the economic winter as traditional banks continue to iterate so they can catch up and offer more user-friendly services. This is not the time to raise fees, slow down on product development or plans to acquire new users.

Nine-figure rounds

Back in January, I looked at challenger banks and their growth trajectories, but since then, they have managed to attract even more customers. According to the most recent figures:

• Nubank has 20 million customers;
• Revolut has 10 million users;
• Chime has 8 million users;
• N26 has 5 million users;
• Monzo has 4 million users.

And that’s without mentioning Starling Bank, Atom Bank, Bunq, Bnext, Paysend, etc. At some point, there will be as many challenger banks as non-challenger banks — perhaps we shouldn’t call them challenger banks anymore.

Beyond these startups, trading app Robinhood recently reached 13 million users, international payments startup TransferWise has 7 million customers and cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has 30 million users.