SoftBank-backed digital bank Zopa beefs up executive team with IPO-experienced CTO
Jaidev Janardana, CEO of U.K. digital bank Zopa.
Zopa
LONDON — British digital bank Zopa is beefing up its management team with a couple of senior hires, as the company looks to fuel growth and prepare its business for an eventual public listing.
The SoftBank-backed company, which offers credit cards, personal loans and savings accounts, told CNBC exclusively it has hired Peter Donlon, the former chief technology officer of online card retailer Moonpig, as its CTO.
The firm has also brought in Kate Erb, a qualified chartered accountant from KPMG with over 20 years of experience in financial services, as its chief operating officer.
Erb was most recently an operations director at Leeds Building Society.
Donlon notably saw Moonpig through its public listing in 2021, which valued the company at around £1.2 billion at the time. Moonpig now trades at a price of £151 per share, which gives it a market capitalization of £518 million, reflecting a broad slump in technology shares.
His appointment reflects a push from Zopa to grow in maturity and ramp up user growth in anticipation of an eventual initial public offering (IPO). Zopa had planned to go public last year, however it put this ambition on ice as the stock market took a turn for the worst with rising interest rates clobbering high-growth tech stocks.
CEO Jaidev Janardana insisted the bank has no plans for an IPO in the immediate term, however he suggested a flotation could be on the horizon by mid-next year were sentiment in the public markets to change.
What will need to change for that to happen, he explained, is for the public markets to open back up.
“We haven’t had great IPOs,” he told CNBC in an interview on the sidelines of London Tech Week this week. “I would love to see some successful IPOs actually coming.”
“If you look at kind of banks, and how they’re valued, or tech companies, both of them, public market valuations are not great.”
“The second thing is … liquidity.” he added. “We need to make sure that there is enough liquidity for a public company to be truly public. Shares should be able to be bought and sold reasonably easily.”
Zopa will soon reach 1 million customers, a spokesman for the company told CNBC. It ultimately wants to hit 5 million users in the coming years. The firm competes with large banks as well as fintechs like Monzo, Revolut and Starling.
Janardana suggested the company could look to ramp up growth of its business through mergers and acquisitions, and a move into other areas of finance including small business loans and open banking, which allows for the sharing of data between banks and third-party firms.
Zopa raised £75 million ($95.9 million) from investors earlier this year.
“We are open,” he said. “Where there is opportunity for us to use open banking, infrastructure, data, to be able to provide holistic experiences to customers is something that has been of interest for us.”
“SME (small and medium-sized enterprises) lending is another thing that is of interest for us.”
Zopa reached profitability on a monthly basis in April 2022. Zopa aims to achieve full-year profitability by the end of 2023.
In terms of the products that Janardana isn’t interested in rolling out, crypto tops the list. The financial executive, who has helmed Zopa since 2014, said that crypto “is not great for the retail consumer today.”
“I’m not a big fan of crypto yet, I’m not convinced,” he said. “It’s a complicated product that people don’t understand, which is why we never offered it.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a roundtable discussion at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.
Sarah Meyssonnier | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sold 100,000 shares of the chipmaker’s stock on Friday and Monday, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The sales are worth nearly $15 million at Tuesday’s opening price.
The transactions are the first sale in Huang’s plan to sell as many as 600,000 shares of Nvidia through the end of 2025. It’s a plan that was announced in March, and it’d be worth $873 million at Tuesday’s opening price.
The Nvidia founder still owns more than 800 million Nvidia shares, according to Monday’s SEC filing. Huang has a net worth of about $126 billion, ranking him 12th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The 62-year-old chief executive sold about $700 million in Nvidia shares last year under a prearranged plan, too.
Nvidia stock is up more than 800% since December 2022 after OpenAI’s ChatGPT was first released to the public. That launch drew attention to Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, which were needed to develop and power the artificial intelligence service.
The company’s chips remain in high demand with the majority of the AI chip market, and Nvidia has introduced two subsequent generations of its AI GPU technology.
Nvidia continues to grow. Its stock is up 9% this year, even as the company faces export control issues that could limit foreign markets for its AI chips.
In May, the company reported first-quarter earnings that showed the chipmaker’s revenue growing 69% on an annual basis to $44 billion during the quarter.
Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Anthropic‘s use of books to train its artificial intelligence model Claude was “fair use” and “transformative,” a federal judge ruled late on Monday.
Amazon-backed Anthropic’s AI training did not violate the authors’ copyrights since the large language models “have not reproduced to the public a given work’s creative elements, nor even one author’s identifiable expressive style,” wrote U.S. District Judge William Alsup.
“The purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative,” Alsup wrote. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer.”
The decision was a significant win for AI companies as legal battles play out over the use and application of copyrighted works in developing and training LLMs. Alsup’s ruling begins to establish the legal limits and opportunities for the industry going forward.
A spokesperson for Anthropic said in a statement that the company was “pleased” with the ruling and that the decision was, “Consistent with copyright’s purpose in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress.”
CNBC has reached out to the plaintiffs for comment.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson in August. The suit alleged that Anthropic built a “multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.”
Alsup did, however, order a trial on the pirated material that Anthropic put into its central library of content, even though the company did not use it for AI training.
“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft, but it may affect the extent of statutory damages,” the judge wrote.
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