With the license, the bank joins a list of few digital banks, such as Atom Bank, Tandem and Starling, obtaining approval to launch their banking services.
Mondo said in a statement: “We now enter the ‘mobilisation’ phase and over the coming months will be working with the regulators to get our restrictions lifted and launch a full current account with debit cards, faster payments, direct debits and everything else you’d expect.”
The bank said that it will continue to distribute Mondo Beta cards and develop the Mondo app to enable users to open bank accounts in early 2017.
According to the bank, nearly 30,000 Mondo prepaid cards are currently in circulation.
In February 2016, Mondo invited customers to invest alongside venture capital companies as part of its £6m fundraising round.
The new funding was expected to allow Mondo to start its public launch with an accelerated roll-out of its services.
Mondo said: “We started Mondo back in February 2015 to build a fundamentally different bank. Over the last 18 months, we’ve launched our Alpha and Beta programmes, broken the world record for the fastest crowdfunding campaign ever and more than 200,000 people have signed up to help build the bank of the future.”
In July, the UK authorities approved banking license for another challenger bank Starling Bank.
Starling Bank plans to launch its services to customers by January 2017.
Recently, UK competition watchdog has unveiled a package reforms to ensure that customers benefit from new technologies and smaller banks face fair competition.
Image: UK challenger bank Mondo secures banking license. Photo: courtesy of blackzheep / FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
