Insights: Subscription banking - Can banks turn customers into subscribers?

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Monday Night Football, plus pregame and postgame. NFL Live, NFL Primetime. Everything you need to stay on top of every game, every week.

Joe Wilson (0:40)

Unbelievable.

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Ross Gallagher (1:10)

Welcome to Fintech Insider Insights. I'm Ross Gallagher, the head of consulting at 11FS. Now, for most of modern banking, customers haven't really thought about their bank account as necessarily something they subscribe to. Particularly in markets like the UK, we've become accustomed to getting the basics of banking for free, while banks make money elsewhere in the relationship. But increasingly, that relationship appears to be changing. Monzo has built out paid tiers through Extra Perks and Max. Revolut offers subscriptions ranging from premium and metal through to ultra, and Bunk has built much of its proposition around different membership plans.

Across these products, customers are paying for different combinations of banking features, higher rates, cash back, insurance, travel benefits, rewards and even subscriptions to other services. Of course, paying for banking isn't new. Packaged and premium bank accounts have existed for decades, but the range of subscription models we're seeing today raises a bigger question about what customers actually value enough to pay their bank for every month.

Is it better banking? Financial value? Convenience? Lifestyle benefits? Or maybe something else entirely? And for providers, could subscriptions change not just how banking is packaged, but the economics of the customer relationship itself?

So on this week's episode of Fintech Insider, we're asking, what makes banking worth paying for? And to help us unpack this topic, I'm joined by a great panel of guests. First, we have a welcome back to the show for Joe Wilson, the Chief Evangelist and Senior Strategist at Bunk. Joe, great to have you. Welcome to the show. Maybe you could just give us a little bit of background, maybe both about your role and also about Bunk itself.

Joe Wilson (2:54)

Yeah, sure. Again, thanks for welcoming back. It's really nice to be here. The Chief Evangelist is always a weird title, and nobody quite understands it, but it's not religious. It basically means that I'm moving the information from outside the company in and from inside the company out, and making sure that people understand who we are and what we stand for. That's the simplest version I'll give you. I think if you don't know bunk, I mean bunk is the second largest neo bank in Europe, 22 million users.

I think the whole focus is always people who have an international lifestyle, so people who may be working between more than one country to another, or whose life is larger than a single country.

Ross Gallagher (3:33)

Awesome. Thank you, Joe. I'm excited that you've brought your experience and perspectives to what I think is going to be an interesting discussion around an interesting topic. Thanks for joining us.

Also joining us is Lukas Hora, the Chief Sales Officer at Tapix. Lukas, welcome. Again, maybe you could just give us a little bit of information, a little bit of background about yourself and also about Tapix.

Lukas Hora (3:57)

Sure. Happy to be here, guys.

I'm leading basically global activities of Tapix for the guys that don't know what Tapix does. The easiest way to explain is whenever you tap your card or you pay via transfer and the transaction lands in your mobile banking app, what the bank actually receives is a mess. A truncated text, string, account number or some more messy data that has nothing to do with where you are standing. Yeah. We turn that into something human recognizes, merchant name, logo, category, location. We can even say that this is a subscription you forgot that you are paying.

Through this data, we're actually also helping financial institutions to understand spending patterns of their users. We're helping more than 90 banks and fintechs, and through them, we're supporting nearly 200 million end users.

Ross Gallagher (4:57)

Love it. Awesome. All right. Well, Lukas, great to have you as well. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm looking forward to the discussion.