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Monzo CEO TS Anil.

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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 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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Nintendo’s Switch 2 has powered a $39 billion rally this year

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Nintendo's Switch 2 has powered a  billion rally this year

Nintendo Co. Switch 2 game consoles at a Bic Camera Inc. electronics store in Tokyo, Japan, on Thursday, June 5, 2025. Nintendo Co. fans from Tokyo to Manhattan stood in line for hours to be among the first to get a Switch 2, fueling one of the biggest global gadget debuts since the iPhone launches of yesteryear.

Kiyoshi Ota | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Nintendo shares hit a fresh record high on Wednesday, continuing this year’s massive rally that has been fueled by hype around the company’s newly released Switch 2 console.

Shares of the Japanese gaming giant have jumped 46% this year, adding roughly $39 billion to the stock’s value, according to a CNBC calculation of data from S&P Capital IQ.

The Switch 2 is the successor of the original Switch console, which was released in 2017. Nintendo unveiled details of the Switch 2 in January, and the device went on sale this month, leading to shortages of the console in some markets and even to stores operating special opening hours.

Nintendo this month said it sold 3.5 million units of the Switch 2 in the four days following its launch. The company has previously forecast sales of 15 million units in its fiscal year ending March 2026, though many analysts say that is a modest estimate and expect Nintendo to achieve higher numbers.

Nintendo’s original Switch is its second-most successful console in history, selling over 152 million units since its launch to the quarter ended March this year. Its appeal lies in its hybrid nature — users can play the console on a TV, but can also detach it to use it on the go.

Investors are hoping the Switch 2 will replicate the success of its predecessor.

Nintendo has boosted the the success of its consoles through games involving strong franchises with characters and brands like Super Mario, Zelda and Pokemon. And the company has used its recognizable intellectual property and licensed it to movies and theme parks, boosting the success of its core video game product.

For Nintendo investors, that strategy has paid off. Since March 2017, when the original Switch was released, Nintendo shares have surged nearly 470%, according to S&P Capital IQ data. More than $81 billion has been added to the company’s market capitalization over that period.

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Sam Altman says Meta offered OpenAI staff $100 million bonuses, as Mark Zuckerberg ramps up AI poaching efforts

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Sam Altman says Meta offered OpenAI staff 0 million bonuses, as Mark Zuckerberg ramps up AI poaching efforts

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the Snowflake Summit in San Francisco on June 2, 2025.

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Meta Platforms tried to poach OpenAI employees by offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million, with even larger annual compensation packages, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said.

While Meta had sought to hire “a lot of people” from OpenAI, “so far none of our best people have decided to take them up on that,” Altman said, speaking on the “Uncapped” podcast, which is hosted by his brother.

“I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor,” he said. “Their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they have hoped and I respect being aggressive and continuing to try new things.”

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

The Meta CEO is personally trying to assemble a top artificial intelligence team for its “superintelligence” AI lab and has invested heavily in AI through its Meta AI research division, which also oversees its Llama series of open-source large language models.

The moves come after Meta had once again delayed the release of its latest flagship AI model due to concerns about its capabilities, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, sources have previously told CNBC that Zuckerberg has become so frustrated with Meta’s standing in AI that he’s willing to invest billions in top talent. 

Last week Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale AI, announced he was leaving for Meta as part of a deal that saw the Facebook parent dish out $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in the AI startup. Wang added that a small number of Scale AI employees would also join Meta as part of the agreement. 

What Meta's Scale AI deal reveals about the battle for top AI talent

The Times had previously reported that Wang would head a research lab pursuing “superintelligence,” an AI system that surpasses human intelligence.

The company has also recently poached other top talent, including Jack Rae, a principal researcher at Google’s AI research laboratory DeepMind, according to a report from Bloomberg. The report added that Zuckerberg had been directly involved with the recruitment efforts. 

Speaking on the podcast, which was released on Tuesday, Altman said that Meta’s strategy of offering a large, upfront, guaranteed compensation would detract from the actual work and not set up a winning culture.

“I think that there’s a lot of people, and Meta will be a new one, that are saying ‘we’re just going to try to copy OpenAI,'” he added. “That basically never works. You’re always going to where your competitor was, and you don’t build up a culture of learning what it’s like to innovate.”

However, spending big on startups and their talent is nothing new to the AI space. Former Apple chief design officer Jony Ive joined OpenAI after the company acquired Ive’s AI devices startup io through a $6.4 billion all-equity deal last month.

Some tech analysts have also pushed back against the notion that Meta has been missing the mark on AI.

“They basically built the rails for open source AI development, and so much of what is happening in AI is being built on Meta,” Daniel Newman, CEO at Futurum Group, told CNBC’s “Power Lunch” last week. 

Open-source generally refers to software in which the source code is made freely available on the web for possible modification and redistribution. Llama’s open-source characteristics have allowed many third-party applications to be built on top of it.  

Newman added that Meta’s massive investments, such as in ScaleAI, will continue to push it forward in training its behemoth models.

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Trump to extend TikTok deadline for third time, pushing decision out another 90 days

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Trump to extend TikTok deadline for third time, pushing decision out another 90 days

Muhammed Selim Korkutata | Anadolu | Getty Images

For a third time since taking office in January, President Donald Trump plans to extend a deadline that would require China’s ByteDance to divest TikTok’s U.S. business.

“President Trump will sign an additional Executive Order this week to keep TikTok up and running,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark. This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure.”

ByteDance was nearing the deadline of June 19, to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations in order to satisfy a national security law that the Supreme Court upheld just a few days before Trump’s second presidential inauguration. Under the law, app store operators like Apple and Google and internet service providers would be penalized for supporting TikTok.

ByteDance originally faced a Jan. 19 deadline to comply with the national security law, but Trump signed an executive order when he first took office that pushed the deadline to April 5. Trump extended the deadline for the second time a day before that April mark.

Trump told NBC News in May that he would extend the TikTok deadline again if no deal was reached, and he reiterated his plans on Thursday.

Prior to Trump signing the first executive order, TikTok briefly went offline in the U.S. for a day, only to return after the president’s announcement. Apple and Google also removed TikTok from the Apple App Store and Google Play during TikTok’s initial U.S. shut down, but then reinstated the app to their respective app stores in February.

Multiple parties including Oracle, AppLovin, and Billionaire Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty consortium have expressed interest in buying TikTok’s U.S. operations. It’s unclear whether the Chinese government would approve a deal.

— CNBC’s Kevin Breuninger contributed to this report

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