Tom Blomfield who co-founded Monzo Bank 2015, is leaving the digital bank, citing “challenges” from the pandemic, TechCrunch reported.
In May last year, Blomfield moved from the position of CEO to the newly established position of president to focus on the long-term vision of the company. He has also stepped down from the board during June last year.
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Blomfield claims he wasn’t pushed out by investors. Instead, the Monzo board actually pushed him to remain as CEO longer than he wanted or perhaps should have, he told to TechCrunch.
However, Blomfield gives a lot of credit to the personalities of the new Monzo leadership. He described Monzo’s new CEO TS Anil as doing a “phenomenal” job and Sujata Bhatia, who joined as COO last year, as “an absolute machine, a real operator”.
TS Anil was previously assigned as a leader for the Monzo’s US push. He has 25-year financial services experience, previously he was Visa’s global head of payment products and platforms but he has also worked for Citi, Capital One, and Standard Chartered.
In a telephone interview Blomfield said:
“I stopped enjoying my role probably about two years ago. As we grew from a scrappy startup that was iterating and building stuff people really love, into a really important U.K. bank. I’m not saying that one is better than the other, just that the things I enjoy in life is working with small groups of passionate people to start and grow stuff from scratch, and create something customers love.”
“And I think that’s a really valuable skill but also taking on a bank that’s three, four, five million customers and turning it into a 10 or 20 million customer bank and getting to profitability and IPOing it, I think those are huge exciting challenges, just honestly not ones that I found that I was interested in or particularly good at,” he added.
Monzo bank has now about 4.8 million customers as it has closed another £60 million in funding last December.
