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.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025.
Hamad I Mohammed | Reuters
Tesla’s shares have finally turned positive for the year.
After a dismal first quarter, which was the worst for the stock in any period since 2022, and a brutal start to April, following President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping new tariffs, Wall Street has again rallied around the electric vehicle maker.
The stock rose 3.6% on Monday to $410.26, topping its closing price of 2024 by over $6. It’s up 85% since bottoming for the year at $221.86 on April 4. A new filing revealed that CEO Elon Musk purchased about $1 billion worth of shares in the company through his family foundation.
It’s the second straight year Tesla has bounced back after a down first quarter. Last year, the shares fell 29% in the first three months before ending up 63% for 2024.
In recent weeks, analysts have praised the EV maker’s proposed pay plan for Musk, which could amount to a $1 trillion windfall for the world’s richest person over the next decade. The company has also gotten a boost from its new MegaBlocks battery energy storage systems that Tesla ships preassembled to businesses looking to lower their power costs or make greater use of electricity from renewable resources.
Even with the rebound, Tesla is the second-worst performer this year among tech’s megacaps, ahead of only Apple, which is down about 5% in 2025. Tesla is still in the midst of a multi-quarter sales slump due to an aging lineup of EVs and increased competition from lower-cost competitors in China, namely BYD.
Tesla has seen a consumer backlash, in part because of Musk’s political activities, including spending nearly $300 million to propel President Trump back to the White House and his work with the Trump administration to slash the federal workforce.
Tesla leadership has been working to shift investors’ attention to other topics such as robotaxis and humanoid robots.
However, the company has yet to deliver vehicles that are safe to use without a human onboard and ready to take control if needed. And while Musk is touting Tesla’s Optimus robots, which he says will be able to do everything from factory work to babysitting, a product is still a long way from hitting the market.
Shares of the search giant jumped more than 4% on Monday, pushing the company into territory occupied only by Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple.
The stock got a big lift in early September from an antitrust ruling by a judge, whose penalties came in lighter than shareholders feared. The U.S. Department of Justice wanted Google to be forced to divest its Chrome browser, and last year a district court ruled that the company held an illegal monopoly in search and related advertising.
But Judge Amit Mehta decided against the most severe consequences proposed by the DOJ, which sent shares soaring to a record. After the big rally, President Donald Trump congratulated the company and called it “a very good day.”
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Alphabet shares are now up more than 30% this year, compared to the 15% gain for the Nasdaq.
The $3 trillion milestone comes roughly 20 years after Google’s IPO and a little more than 10 years after the creation of Alphabet as a holding company, with Google its prime subsidiary.
CEO Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Alphabet in 2019, replacing co-founder Larry Page. Pichai’s latest challenge has been the surge of new competition due to the rise of artificial intelligence, which the company has had to manage through while also fending off an aggressive set of regulators in the U.S. and Europe.
The rise of Perplexity and OpenAI ended up helping Google land the recent favorable antitrust ruling. The company’s hopes of becoming a major AI player largely ride with Gemini, Google’s flagship suite of AI models.
The U.S. and China have reached a ‘framework’ deal for social media platform TikTok, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday.
“It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon,” he said from U.S.-China talks in Madrid.
Both President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet Friday to discuss the terms. Trump also said in a Truth Social post Monday that a deal was reached “on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save.”
Bessent indicated that the framework could pivot the platform to U.S.-controlled ownership.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The comments came during the latest round of trade discussions between the U.S. and China. Relations have soured between the two countries in recent months from Trump’s tariffs and other trade restrictions.
At the same time, TikTok parent company ByteDance faces a Sept. 17 deadline to divest the platform’s U.S. business or face being shut down in the country.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Monday that the deadline may need to be pushed back to get the deal signed, but there won’t be ongoing extensions.
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Congress passed a law last year prohibiting app store operators like Apple and Google from distributing TikTok in the U.S. due to its “foreign adversary-controlled application” status.
But Trump postponed the shutdown in January, signing an executive order in January that gave ByteDance 75 more days to make a deal. Further extensions came by way of executive orders in April and in June.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnicksaid in July that TikTok would shutter for Americans if China doesn’t give the U.S. more autonomy over the popular short-form video app.
As for who controls the platform, Trump told Fox News in June that he had a group of “very wealthy people” ready to buy the app and could reveal their identities in two weeks. The reveal never came.
He has previously said he’d be open to Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison or Tesla CEO Elon Musk buying TikTok in the U.S. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity has submitted a bid for an acquisition, as has businessman Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty internet advocacy group, CNBC reported in January.
Trump told CNBC in an interview last year that he believed the platform was a national security threat, although the White House started a TikTok account in August.