"Selling a bank licence puts you somewhere between a venture capitalist with no funds to deploy and a management consultant. And then you are also the bank." That is how Phoebe Wallis, Chief Revenue Officer at Griffin, describes her job.
💡
📄
Prefer to read? The full transcript of this episode is available here.
Griffin is a UK bank that other companies build financial products on. It applied for its own licence rather than run on an e-money licence, a process that started at the beginning of 2020 and ran into a pandemic and a very different rates environment.
We get into what a fintech or a non-financial brand gives up when an e-money institution sits between it and the bank, the three types of no Phoebe gives, and the one document that decides most of those answers.
Key Takeaways:
- Why an e-money institution and a bank look identical to the end customer, and why custody of funds and a deposit are fundamentally different things
- What you give up with an EMI: no visibility into, and no control over, the bank underneath it
- Why many fintechs enter the market with an EMI and move to a bank once they want control over pricing and risk appetite
- Why Griffin applied for its own licence in early 2020, and why the process took longer than the team expected
- Why Griffin is API first and deliberately has no consumer-facing front end
- Why a non-financial brand needs internal conviction and a business case, and where a programme manager comes in
- The three types of no, and why the flow of funds document matters more than the pitch
- Why business banking is still underserved compared to consumer, and where wealth is heading
- What to check before you approach a bank: risk appetite, eligibility criteria, pricing and sandbox