Fintech

London-based payments group Checkout.com has put its annualised net revenue at $750m, up 28% year on year, and expects $150m of adjusted EBITDA for 2026. The figures value the business, last marked at $12bn, at about 16 times its current revenue run rate.

A group of challenger and specialist lenders including Revolut, Monzo and Shawbrook has asked the Chancellor to raise the profit allowance on the 3% bank surcharge fivefold to £500m, a change they estimate would cost the Treasury £39m.

Advent International has registered interest in buying a minority stake in Monzo, giving the digital bank a second route to a valuation of £8bn or more alongside takeover talks with Brazil's Nu Holdings that could value it at up to £10bn.

Revolut has started a three-day pilot of "Pay with Smile", which it describes as the UK's first in-store facial recognition checkout, at three London cafés, with merchants charged 0% processing fees. It is also launching a new point-of-sale terminal, Revolut Register, at a 50% discount of £349.50 plus VAT.

Irish payments and foreign exchange group Fexco is putting £7.5m into Tenora, split between a £5.5m equity investment and a £2m funding line, adding a second strategic backer to the cap table of the FX technology firm founded by former Argentex chief Harry Adams.

Monzo has launched Aura, a metal credit card costing £15 a month with a credit limit of up to £15,000 and cashback that is automatically invested as customers spend. The digital bank values the bundled perks at more than £360 a year.

Revolut has confirmed it handed customer identity documents and transaction histories to an unauthorised third party that submitted fraudulent requests from a legitimate government agency email domain. The disclosure lands while the London fintech prepares an initial public offering reported at up to $200bn.

Funding Circle closed down 8.7% at 210p on 8 September after Lisa Jacobs told the board she intends to leave the chief executive role no later than September 2027. The stock opened 10% lower, wiping out much of the gain from a first half the London-listed SME lender had presented as its strongest on record.

Revolut has received conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a US national bank charter, the first of three regulatory clearances it needs before opening an American bank. The Canary Wharf company was valued at $115bn in a secondary share sale in July.

Atom Bank is preparing to replace Mark Mullen, its co-founder and chief executive of more than a decade, two months after shareholders shelved an auction that sought a valuation of between £600m and £1bn. Chief financial officer Andrew Marshall is expected to take the job on an interim basis.

Revolut, valued at $75bn, has begun rolling out EURR, a euro-denominated stablecoin minted by Stripe-owned Bridge, to eligible customers in Denmark, Poland and Portugal. Wider availability across the European Economic Area is expected later this year.

Deutsche Bank has picked London-based Thought Machine to run the core systems behind its German retail and wealth management business under a 10-year agreement. Terms were not disclosed, but the bank is spending about €600m consolidating its Private Bank platforms and expects roughly €300m in annual savings by 2028.

Revolut has created Revolut Research, a dedicated AI research division that will own the bank's proprietary AI and machine learning work, anchored on PRAGMA — a finance-specific foundation model built in partnership with Nvidia and trained on data from its 80 million customers.

Gary Hoffman is to stand down as chair of Monzo in September after nearly eight years, with Karen Peacock named interim successor. The change lands as the digital bank prepares the ground for a potential listing that could value it at around £6bn.

Newcastle-based Noggin HQ has closed an oversubscribed £2.3m seed round led by Blackfinch Ventures, taking total funding to roughly £3m, and has secured Financial Conduct Authority authorisation to operate as a credit reference agency — one of only a handful granted in the UK in the past decade.

London payments company Cashflows has taken an undisclosed equity stake in Blackpool-based Tap & Go, converting a two-year commercial partnership into a direct investment that will fund the merchant-services challenger's expansion into e-commerce, virtual payments and multi-site solutions.

London-founded Model ML has taken a strategic equity investment from HSBC Asset Management's flagship venture capital strategy, pushing its total raised beyond $100m two years after the company was founded. Terms were not disclosed.

Revolut has been granted a full banking licence in France following a joint assessment by the ACPR and the European Central Bank, giving the London-based fintech a second regulated European banking entity as it targets more than 30 million customers across Western Europe.

UK fintech companies raised $1.5bn (£1.1bn) in the first half of 2026, down 26% year on year, with the fall driven almost entirely by a 45% collapse in late-stage rounds even as seed funding nearly doubled.