Currensea is a new travel debit card that connects to your high street bank account and saves on charges.
Summary
- The UK’s First Open Banking Debit card
- Authorised by the FCA and a principal member of Mastercard
- One of the few fintechs to build their own cloud payment platform
- 2022 Q1, customer spending has grown by over 35% month on month
Operations
Spending abroad should be a breeze.
That’s why the company launched Currensea, the UK’s first direct debit travel card—empowering customers to spend abroad as they do at home, without the bank fees.
Currensea calculates that UK cardholders pay £2.7 billion in bank fees every year when spending abroad. One way to stop these charges is to switch to a challenger bank, but that means having to run a second bank account. This might be why Currensea estimates that only 0.2% of UK adults switch each year.
Those days are over. Currensea bridges the gap.
Forget managing another account, constantly topping up and losing track of your balances. Currensea makes it hassle-free! The card seamlessly connects to an existing bank account, and simply removes the bank fees when you spend overseas.
Currensea has changed the goalposts here, so the company thought it only fair to share the benefits. Hence, Currensea has opened-up the platform for other organisations to use, mixing profit with purpose, and generating revenue streams for great causes:
As seen on TV
Here’s Harry Wallop in TV’s Gadget Show, giving his views on Currensea and why it’s better than the alternatives:
Monetisation strategy
Currensea has multiple revenue streams:
- Card interchange (paid by the merchant when the card is used)
- Card FX (a 0.5% spread on its Essential card)
- Subscriptions (the annual charges its premium and Elite cards)
- Transfer FX (a 0.5% spread on international transfers)
But also low costs:
Holding a customer's money is expensive. Regulation, financial crime, cyber etc. The risks are just so high. Currensea has built its technology to be as secure as any bank, but unlike challenger banks or pre-pay cards, the company doesn’t hold its customers money, so it doesn’t have those massive costs. Currensea reckons high-street banks are pretty good at doing that, they’re just not so good at some of the other things.
Use of proceeds
The funds raised in this investment round, which includes this Seedrs campaign, will be used predominantly in two areas:
User Acquisition (60%) - Currensea is scaling rapidly through cost-effective core digital channels and a referral rate that is now over 50% of sign-ups and increasing monthly. Now, Currensea plans to take growth to the next level, powering an ever-growing list of partner brands while broadening market awareness of Currensea.
Product (40%) - Building on its Open Banking platform, Currensea has an ambitious and exciting roadmap.
- Opening up the platform to an even wider set of use cases and partners
- Broadening the base Currensea proposition to give customers an even more compelling set of features - in areas such as spending at home, transferring money, and a whole host of others.
Team
Management
Co-Founder: Craig Goulding
Co-Founder: James Lynn
Chief Engineer: Abhisek Paul
Advisors
Maurice Cleaves
Sean Hastings
Marc O'Brien
Robin Terrell
Ian O'Doherty
Alnoor Ramji