It was an eventful month in the financial sector. Catch up on six of our most-read news and updates from July 2024.

Revolut is finally granted a UK banking license

After three years of trying, Revolut has been granted a banking license, with restrictions, by the Financial Conduct Authority. Once the ‘mobilisation stage’ has been completed and the restrictions have been removed, the fintech will be able to  build up its deposit base and add products like loans, mortgages and credit cards to its service offering.

The license has previously been held up due to issues over compliance, the size of the business (over 42 million customers), as well as repeated failures to file accounts on time.

Chaps goes down

On 18th July, the UK’s real-time gross settlement system Chaps went down. The problem, which was believed to be related to issues connecting to the Swift financial messaging system, cause global payments issues, including delayed high value payments such as house purchases.

Just a day after, on 19th July , banks, FIs and other industries were hit with disruptions as a faulty CrowdStrike update caused global Microsoft outages. Among others, the London Stock Exchange's RNS was knocked out, and JP Morgan and UBS were among those reported to be struggling to finalise trades.

Bank of England seeks input from the private sector on payments innovation

The Bank of England published a discussion paper earlier this month that set out its response to rapid innovations in payments and their impact on monetary and financial stability. The central bank’s governor, Andrew Bailey, stated that confidence in money and payments is fundamental to the bank’s responsibility for monetary and financial stability.

The pipeline of plans includes an ongoing renewal programme for the Real Time Gross Settlement system, a programme of experiments for a wholesale Central Bank Digital Currency, and the potential use of tokenised money and programmable payments.

Responses to the discussion paper are requested by October 31, 2024.

Open banking hits 10 million users in the UK

Six and a half years after its rollout, open banking in the UK is now used by over 10 million users and small businesses. Open Banking Limited stated that the ecosystem fostered by open banking  was worth more than £4 billion to the economy as well as creating around 5,000 skilled digital jobs.

Chase customers can no longer make BNPL payments with credit card

Chase Bank announced that effective 10th October, 2024, customers will no longer be able to use their credits cards to pay for third-party Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) instalment plans.

The bank offers its own BNPL service (Chase Pay Over Time) that lets customers split credit card purchases into instalments.

Monzo rolls out new fraud controls

In early July, Monzo has rolled out a trio of new fraud controls to protect customers from reduce the risk of fraudulent transactions in case of phone theft, shoulder surfing or impersonation scams.

The opt in controls are called:

• Known Locations: where transactions over a certain amount will only be approved in certain locations like home or work.
• Trusted Contacts: where users can invite a trusted person to review whether a transaction or withdrawal over a chosen limit looks safe or suspiscous (the trusted contact also needs to be a Monzo user).
• Secret QR code: A QR code stored on another device to be used to approve a payment or savings withdrawal over their chosen limit.