SoftBank-backed fintech Zopa aims to double profit this year as it eyes 2025 current account launch
Jaidev Janardana, CEO of U.K. digital bank Zopa.
Zopa
LISBON, Portugal — British online lender Zopa is on track to double profits and increase annual revenue by more than a third this year amid bumper demand for its banking services, the company’s CEO told CNBC.
Zopa posted revenues of £222 million ($281.7 million) in 2023 and is expecting to cross the £300 million revenue milestone this year — that would mark a 35% annual jump.
The 2024 estimates are based on unaudited internal figures.
The firm also says it is on track to increase pre-tax profits twofold in 2024, after hitting £15.8 million last year.
Zopa, a regulated bank that is backed by Japanese giant SoftBank, has plans to venture into the world of current accounts next year as it looks to focus more on new products.
The company currently offers credit cards, personal loans and savings accounts that it offers through a mobile app — similar to other digital banks such as Monzo and Revolut which don’t operate physical branches.
“The business is doing really well. In 2024, we’ve hit or exceeded the plans across all metrics,” CEO Jaidev Janardana told CNBC in an interview Wednesday.
He said the strong performance is coming off the back of gradually improving sentiment in the U.K. economy, where Zopa operates exclusively.
Commenting on Britain’s macroeconomic conditions, Janardana said, “While it has been a rough few years, in terms of consumers, they have continued to feel the pain slightly less this year than last year.”
The market is “still tight,” he noted, adding that fintech offerings such as Zopa’s — which typically provide higher savings rates than high-street banks — become “more important” during such times.
“The proposition has become more relevant, and while it’s tight for customers, we have had to be much more constrained in terms of who we can lend to,” he said, adding that Zopa has still been able to grow despite that.
A big priority for the business going forward is product, Janardana said. The firm is developing a current account product which would allow users to spend and manage their money more easily, in a similar fashion to mainstream banking providers like HSBC and Barclays, as well as fintech upstarts such as Monzo.
“We believe that there is more that the consumer can have in the current account space,” Janardana said. “We expect that we will launch our current account with the general public sometime next year.”
Janardana said consumers can expect a “slick” experience from Zopa’s current account offering, including the ability to view and manage multiple account bank accounts from one interface and access to competitive savings rates.
IPO ‘not top of mind’
Zopa is one of many fintech companies that has been viewed as a potential IPO candidate. Around two years ago, the firm said that it was planning to go public, but later decided to put those plans on ice, as high interest rates battered technology stocks and the IPO market froze over in 2022.
Janardana said he doesn’t envision a public listing as an immediate priority, but noted he sees signs pointing toward a more favorable U.S. IPO market next year.
That should mean that Europe becomes more open to IPOs happening later in 2026, according to Janardana. He didn’t disclose where Zopa would end up going public.
“To be honest, it’s not the top of mind for me,” Janardana told CNBC. “I think we continue to be lucky to have supportive and long-term shareholders who support future growth as well.”
Last year, Zopa made two senior hires, appointing Peter Donlon, ex-chief technology officer at online card retailer Moonpig, as its own CTO. The firm also hired Kate Erb, a chartered accountant from KPMG, as its chief operating officer.
The company raised $300 million in a funding round led by Japanese tech investor SoftBank in 2021 and was last valued by investors at $1 billion.
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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