Technology

Posted on July 13, 2018 by staff

Could Lidl or Aldi launch their own bank cards?

Technology

The boss of a fast-growing FinTech firm has said the company wants to help the likes of Lidl, Aldi or Nisa launch their own bank cards within six months using its technology.

Muhammad Asim is the chief executive of Manchester-based Marq Millions, the company behind Arro Money, which uses AI to help users set up a bank account in a matter of minutes.

After being named ‘Youngest Successful Business Entrepreneur’ by the Government of Pakistan in 2010, Asim came to the UK to launch Marq Millions at 22 alongside his three other co-founders.

The co-founders have invested £5m in the business which targets people who are new to the UK or who struggled to get a traditional bank account.

The application process takes as little as three minutes to complete and has got 20,000 personal account holders already.

Asim now wants to offer the technology as a white label product for retailers and businesses who want to get into the banking space. The firm says its ideal partners would be supermarkets or retailers who don’t currently offer a pre-paid or travel card.

“We want to sell this technology to all the people who want to launch a bank over here, like Lidl or Aldi,” he told BusinessCloud at our ‘The Future of FinTech’ breakfast event in London.

“Tesco has a bank, Orange has a bank and there are a lot of challenger banks here, but a lot of people want to enter the banking space but don’t have the enhanced capability or the technology to do that.

“Marq Millions enables them to do that, to launch a bank [card] within three to six months, based on our technology and licence.”

As a result of Arro’s growth, the firm recently moved into larger offices in Manchester and tripled the size of its team to handle increasing customer demand.

“We have almost 5,000 people signing up monthly and we believe we can get a million users very easily,” Asim said.

Marq Millions is not a bank but an “e-money issuer”.

Also speaking at the event was Tech Nation’s FinTech lead Greg Michel; Rachel Bentley, FinTech senior manager at KPMG; Jonathan Simnett, director at Hampleton Partners; Capitalise’s managing director Paul Surtees; Tim Kimball, CTO, Aire Labs Credit Score; Kerim Derhalli, CEO, Invstr; Felicia Meyerowitz, CEO, Akoni Hub; Emilie Bellet, founder and CEO, Vestpod;  James Ferretti, bank integrations lead engineer, TransferWise; Nicola Horlick, CEO, Money&Co; and John Battersby, head of communications and policy, Ratesetter