Dogwifhat

Good morning, you glorious beasts.

Parakeet populations have exploded 2000% across the UK, with ornithologists calling for the "green invaders" to be caught and caged.

Someone tell Nigel and Reform. They’ll sort this out.

FINTECH
Monzo hits £1 billion annual revenue

Monzo had a good year.

The UK challenger bank increased its revenue by 48% in 2024, adding 4 million new customers along the way.

That booked them a pre-tax profit of £60.5 million versus £13.9 million last year. 

How did they do it? (Aside from alchemy)

• New products = new customers. Like U16 accounts and pension plans. 

• Existing customers gave them more money. Possibly because… 

• People trust them. 33% of Monzo’s customers now use it as their only bank. 

How did they get here? 

Monzo’s game is second to none. 

• They know their millennial audience (and their social media is wunderbar)

• They spent relatively little on marketing early on, leaning on referrals to acquire customers until 2018. This bagged them 50-100k free users every month.

• They adopted machine learning before it was cool, using smart notifications for saving goals based on individual account activity.

• They encourage users to rinse their product in their own forums, which provides a rapid feedback loop for everything they do.

So what happens now? 

🇪🇺 They want to go where Revolut has gone: into Europe via Ireland (and expand a bit in the USA).

🚨 They’re still being investigated by the UK financial watchdog for breaching anti money laundering (AML) laws, the hounds. 

🏦 They want to go public but no one can agree on where to list Monzo. 

The board wants it listed in its London home but CEO TS Anil wants it listed in the USA. 

Don’t tell me: another great British company leaving (more on that later)…

CRYPTO
Crypto joins the normies - is it finally going mainstream?

For the first time ever, a publicly-listed British company is about to start letting customers trade cryptocurrencies. 

What’s going on? 

The IG Group, one of the UK’s biggest online trading platforms, will let customers buy and sell:

• Bitcoin. 

• Ethereum. 

• Even dogwifhat (yes, I do mean dogwifhat). 

Nerds.

They’re doing this in partnership with Uphold, an American crypto asset platform. 

Why the hell should I give a damn? 

• This is the first public company to do so. 

• And maybe, just maybe it’ll bring some much-needed credibility to crypto. 

Because UK regulators are pretty sceptical about crypto, regardless of what our unstable friend Donald is doing across the pond. 

This comes at a curious time

Because: 

• 12% of the British public own some form of cryptocurrency (and the UK is experiencing more crypto ownership growth than any European country)

• Crypto trading is making record sums (thanks in part to Trump’s pro-crypto stance)

• HMRC will start collecting data from trading platforms about UK users to extend its parasitic arm further afield

• And the UK government, aiming to bring crypto into the fold, is about to introduce bigger, better crypto regulations.

In short, we’ll probably see more companies doing this. However:

There’s a teething problem

Anyone trading with this scheme won’t be protected. Because:

• Uphold isn’t covered by the Financial Services Compensation scheme

• Which means if Uphold goes under, anyone with crypto assets won’t get their money back. 

Which wouldn’t be lovely.

STOCKS
Another great company leaves London

Pharma company Invidior has now officially severed ties with the London Stock Exchange (LSE), the most recent exit of a big, fat London-listed company.

Why? 

Because trading on the Nasdaq made more sense.

LSE admin was too expensive (like the Tobin Tax, which taxes each stock transaction).

And most of its shareholders were US-based. 

Plus, 80% of its business is in America, which has a little problem with addiction to opioids and painkillers. 

But there’s more to it than that.

LSE is having a bad time

Invidior’s delisting from the LSE speaks of a broader trend. 

• Last year, 88 companies delisted from the LSE - the most since the Financial Crisis

• This includes JustEast and Paddy Power

• But only 18 new listings (the lowest since 2010)

• And now Shein won’t be joining us. 

Why is it failing? 

The truth is a bit sad.

UK companies are massively undervalued, if you believe BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. 

In comparison, US-listings offer much more capital. 

It’s a no-brainer. 

NEWS BITES
This just in…

• ♻️ 📉 Fewer British startups monitor their carbon footprint but more of them are spending money on upskilling their workforce. It’s the first drop ever recorded, according to data taken from 711 VC-backed UK startups. Before Extinction Rebellion start going mental, just remember that UK startups are more likely to have Net Zero policies than their European or American counterparts.

• 🧑‍💼 🤖 Civil servants saved 26 minutes a day using Microsoft Copilot, according to a government study. Copilot lets employees complete tasks with a chatbot instead of manually clicking on Excel spreadsheets and Word documents. The 3-month study of 20,000 civil servants found that 70% spent less time doing manual tasks, and more time on strategy. A total saving of 13 working days a year.

• 🔎 🏘️ A company will pay you to grass on your neighbour. One lady said she’d earned £10,000 from doing it - and spends the money on her holidays. YouSpotProperty.com rewards people up to £10,000 who report empty properties across the UK. Under the scheme, spotters get a £20 voucher for every reported property. If the company buys the property, they pay the spotter 1% of the price (with a £10,000 minimum). I haven’t seen Brenda over the road for a while… 

• 💻️ 🦹‍♂️ North Face and Cartier were hacked, with customer data stolen like names and email addresses. Outdoor clothing retailer North Face said it was hacked using a technique called credential stuffing, where hackers try usernames and passwords stolen from another hack, hoping that customers used the same passwords for multiple accounts. 

• 🏥💰️ UK medical robotics company CMR is looking to sell for $4 billion, hoping to place its human-arm-shaped surgical robot in as many hospitals across the world. It’ll certainly attract loads of big foreign buyers, particularly since it just got FDA-approved in the US. And it’s doubtful that they’ll stay in the UK, considering the paltry access to capital and weak domestic scale-up support. 

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 🌌 Cardiff-based Space Forge just got $30 million in its Series A funding round, owing to its amazing spacetech, which helps build advanced semiconductor materials using microgravity. European climate VC World Fund and US defence contractor Northrop Grumman led the funding round.

How can you let people know you’re cool and mysterious?

Share Bunce with your friends. 

Not only will people know you’re cool (you read Bunce after all), but you’ll get free stuff emblazoned with “Bunce”.

This will make you more mysterious because no one knows what Bunce is. Yet. 

These are scientific facts. 

So don’t be anti-science: spew us everywhere like an airborne disease.