Britain’s $4.5 billion digital bank Monzo debuts investments feature
Monzo CEO TS Anil.
Monzo
Monzo, the $4.5 billion digital challenger bank, launched a feature that lets users make investments —marking its first foray into the massive financial investment market.
The feature, called Investments, will allow Monzo’s customers to invest in a number of funds managed by asset management giant BlackRock. CNBC got an early look at the product in Monzo’s headquarters last week. It’s set to start rolling out Tuesday, and will allow users to invest with as little as £1.
The move will put Monzo into competition with large established banks like Chase, which offers online investment management through its Nutmeg subsidiary; asset management firms; and younger startup competitors such as Chip, Moneybox, and Plum.
Monzo already lets its customers put their money into interest-yielding savings pots. But this is the first time the company is making a move into the world of investing.
The application process is pretty straightforward. Customers will be invited to a waitlist to access the product. Eligible users who’ve joined the waitlist will then get invited to create an investment pot.
After that, they’ll be taken through to a set of screens where they learn about the product and get to choose from three funds handpicked by BlackRock based on different risk levels.
Monzo Investments will allow users to start investing with as little as £1.
Monzo
The choice is split between three funds managed by BlackRock: Careful, Balanced and Adventurous. At the “careful” end of the scale is a low-risk, low-return fund; the “balanced” fund has medium high risk and reward; while the “adventurous” one is about higher-risk allocations with much larger potential returns.
Lack of investing knowledge among Brits
TS Anil, Monzo’s co-founder and CEO, said the company had worked to bring about an investment feature to tackle a lack of knowledge from Brits when it comes to investing.
“There’s many, many barriers customers have in getting started … and the aim of our product is to banish those barriers,” Anil told CNBC in an interview ahead of the product launch. “One of the biggest barriers is the idea that investing isn’t affordable so people can’t get started. With Monzo Investments, you can start from £1.”
“Another of these is that they feel overwhelmed as they don’t have the knowledge they need to get started, so we’ve embedded the knowledge and tools to make good decisions,” Anil added. “Another is that it doesn’t feel personalised, so we’re offering three simple options based on individual risk preferences to ensure it’s tailored to them.”
According to YouGov research commissioned by Monzo, 69% of the U.K. population aren’t sure where to go for an accessible and simple-to-use investing product, while 60% of adults say they’d be inclined to invest if the minimum investment amount is low. Meanwhile, 24% of U.K. adults who invest admitted to “winging it.”
The figures are based on a sample of 2,035 adults in Britain. Fieldwork for the research was undertaken between July 27 and July 28.
YouGov research commissioned by Monzo shows that 69% of Brits don’t know where to turn when it comes to investing.
Monzo
The investments pots feature will appear in a new part of the home screen on Monzo called Savings & Investments. The product will be rolled out to all eligible customers over the coming weeks, Monzo said.
But if Monzo’s data shows a customer is in financial difficulty — for example, if they’re falling behind on debt repayments — the ability to open new investments won’t show up at all.
The feature also gives users flexibility to amend, cancel or withdraw their investments at any time, meaning they can pull out of their investment even if they’ve already decided on it.
Monzo now counts more than 8 million customers in the U.K., a milestone the bank hit only eight months after hitting the 7 million user milestone.
The company is looking to push into new parts of financial services and generate new revenue sources as it seeks to edge toward full-year profitability. Monzo reported its first two months of profitability in 2023, a milestone the bank won off the back of surging lending income, thanks to higher interest rates in the U.K.
The feature shows users educational content on the nature of investing.
Monzo
Monzo said it would charge a flat 0.59% fee on customers’ investments each month, which comprises a 0.14% fund fee and a 0.45% platform fee to provide the service. For a customer with £1,000 ($1,250) invested with Monzo, that would translate to roughly 48 pence a month in fees they’d have to pay.
First mover?
Executives at Monzo said during a briefing with CNBC last week that they wanted to launch a product that gives people the ability to invest within an ecosystem of financial services including budgeting, spending, transferring money, and borrowing.
Monzo sees itself as more of a “financial control center” where banking customers go to manage their financial lives, as opposed to a “super app” that offers lots of different services adjacent to banking and financial services.
One of the company’s biggest competitors, Revolut, has frequently touted its aim to become a financial super app encompassing banking, trading, insurance, travel and other services.
Monzo is something of a first mover among licensed neobanks in the U.K. when it comes to offering investments. Competitors like Starling Bank and Zopa don’t yet offer investing features.
Still, several fintech platforms, including Revolut and Freetrade, already offer users the ability to trade stocks. Wise also offers an investment management service.
When asked whether Monzo was late to the party, Anil said: “I don’t think we’re late at all.”
“You could argue we were 500 years late to banking,” he added. “As the country has navigated through a cost of living crisis in the last 24 months, we’ve heard from our customers that now more than ever people want to make good long-term decisions with their money, so the product is well timed from that perspective.”
Gautam Pillai, head of fintech research at the investment bank Peel Hunt, said Monzo’s new investments feature could increase customer “stickiness.”
“The opportunity that Monzo has is going after the greenfield opportunity. They don’t need to worry about the brownfield. They don’t really need it,” Pillai told CNBC.
Monzo is one of many British fintechs on investors’ radar as a potential candidate for an initial public offering in the year ahead.
Anil said the company sees an IPO as another milestone on is journey as a business rather than a target in the near term, adding that the company has no immediate plans for a public listing.
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Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.
Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.
As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.
“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”
The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup.
Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.
“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.
Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.
This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.
Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.
The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.
Technology
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.
Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.
Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.
The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.
Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.
The company has also achieved its own notable milestones this year, as it prospers off the AI boom.
On Wednesday, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker became the first company to top a $4 trillion market capitalization, beating out both Microsoft and Apple. The chipmaker closed above that milestone Thursday as CNBC reported that the technology titan met with President Donald Trump.
Brooke Seawell, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, sold about $24 million worth of Nvidia shares, according to an SEC filing. Seawell has been on the company’s board since 1997, according to the company.
Huang still holds more than 858 million shares of Nvidia, both directly and indirectly, in different partnerships and trusts.
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