Zopa Bank added half a million customers last year, and saw its profits grow by just over 90%, as its transformation into a bank enters a new phase.
Last year, the fintech company, which pioneered peer-to-peer lending in 2005, hit an important milestone with the launch of a current account.
In its latest financial results, Zopa Bank reported a profit of £65m compared with just over £34m the previous year, and a 24% increase in sales, which reached £377m. It now has £6.4bn in deposits, a 17% increase over last year.
In 2024, Zopa’s revenue grew about 30% to reach just over £300m, and its profit doubled.
Its rapid rise since it became a bank in 2020 – dropping its peer-to-peer lending business a year later – is a UK fintech success story.
“[Last year] was another landmark year for Zopa as we expanded into everyday banking,” said Jaidev Janardana, CEO at Zopa Bank.
“We grew our customer base to 1.7 million, supported by strong growth across all products, and from our expansion into current accounts and investments.”
Tech drives firm
Tech know-how is at the heart of its strategy. It has almost 1,000 staff, mainly based in London, a third of whom are technologists, including engineers and data scientists. It is the company’s tech expertise and adaptability that have enabled it to quickly build a current account offering.
“We have typically built a lot of our technology, and that should be the case with the current account as well,” Janardana told Computer Weekly last year. “The architecture is services-oriented, which means there are a lot of things that we have built for our existing products that can be reused. For example, we have a credit card business, which means the debit card works.”
The company does, however, use third-party technology from fintech unicorn Thought Machine for its current account ledger.
The current account comes at a time when challenger finance firms are beginning to make inroads into the market domination of traditional banks. A current account is a means of building a wider relationship with customers, who have tended to regard challenger banks as a secondary finance provider.
Janardana joined Zopa in 2014 as chief operation officer, before becoming CEO a year later.
Within two years of joining the company, Janardana, an engineer who moved into the business side of banking in the US banking sector, kicked off the process of transforming Zopa into a bank and closing down its peer-to-peer lending business.
It bolstered its tech staff in July last year, when it opened its Manchester office, days after launching its current account. It currently has 66 employees at the site, but plans for it to eventually house 500 staff. At the time of opening, the office said it was attracted by the “thriving tech ecosystem, strong financial services presence and deep talent pool”.
