Neobanks built something genuinely transformative, then optimised it for scale until complexity became someone else’s problem – and that gap is now large enough, and visible enough, to attract a new category of specialist.
Those gaps exist at both ends of the market. There are more than 17 million Brits who struggle to access financial services at the lower end of the spectrum: migrants, the self-employed, people for whom traditional account-opening requirements are impossible to meet. Companies like Monese and Suits are building for them.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Access deeper industry intelligence
Experience unmatched clarity with a single platform that combines unique data, AI, and human expertise.
The pattern is the same across the board: the mainstream model serves the median well and everyone else partially. Neobanks solved for the 80%. The most commercially significant gap, however, sits in a different place entirely: the mass affluent, whose financial lives don’t fit inside a neobank app.
Meet Victor, aged 52
Victor is an ears, nose and throat doctor spending half his time in private practice, making around £175,000 a year. He’s remarried, with two kids – one with a learning disability who is considering private education. He has three separate savings accounts. His parents are giving him a £5,000 annual gift. His new wife has a small rental property in Bordeaux, and he’s looking to be added to the mortgage. He suspects the next five years will be his peak earning capacity. None of this fits inside an app built for splitting a dinner bill.
£9tn: The UK mass-affluent segment
There are many Victors in the United Kingdom, with mortgage complexity, tax planning, joint accounts and wealth management considerations. An estimated 10 million mass affluent households in the UK together hold £9tn in wealth. This cohort is underserved and arguably represents the largest concentration of unaddressed financial complexity in the country.
The neobank movement started with a promise: “Banking should be simple, fair and built around the customer,” as Starling founder Anne Boden said more than a decade ago. They were a breath of fresh air compared to clunky, impersonal and expensive legacy institutions, and growth was rapid. Neobanks are now decisively in their second era: mature, increasingly profitable businesses. Revolut’s profit before tax surpassed £1bn in 2024. Revolut’s stated goal is 100 million customers in 100 countries by the end of the decade. The people left behind aren’t in that roadmap.
Look at how this translates into their offering. Revolut’s average deposit is reported to be less than £600 and Monzo’s under £1,500. Starling skews higher, with figures cited at around £3k, but that is still well below what a mass-affluent customer typically holds. The average mass-affluent customer is in their early 50s and has more than £100,000 in investable assets. 51% of Monzo customers are reported to be under 35.
Standardisation is increasingly the point. Monzo’s investment offering was simplified to “T-shirt sizing” – risk levels only, no bespoke allocation. There’s no room for Victor in this model.
Private banks drew their own line
Coutts requires £1m in investable assets to open an account. Below that threshold, you are not their problem. Above the neobank and below the private bank sits a gap that the market has been surprisingly slow to fill.
The answer isn’t retrofitting the neobank model. It’s time to take what worked – digital accessibility, no legacy infrastructure, frictionless onboarding – and build something new specifically for those left behind.
A bank built for someone at that life stage looks different in practice. Concierge services are a practical response to lives that are time-poor but not cash-poor. A restaurant reservation for a 52-year-old entertaining clients carries a different weight than it does for someone in a flatshare. Educational resources speak to the actual pressures of middle life: school fees, ageing parents, pension decisions, and the particular anxiety of suspecting your peak earning years are behind you.
Products recognise that more and more people at this level have some element of self-employment or entrepreneurial income alongside a salary. And crucially, a real picture of financial health means aggregating across institutions – not just what sits in one account, but a consolidated view of investments, pensions, and savings wherever they happen to live.
That’s before AI enters the picture. The possibilities for genuinely personalised financial guidance are only beginning to emerge – and specialists have a structural advantage here. A bank built for Victor accumulates data that a mass-market platform never sees: the Bordeaux mortgage, the school-fee timeline, the mixed-income profile. Models trained on that detail can do something generalists cannot.
The specialists building in this gap understand something the incumbents missed: complexity should not be feared. The market of those left behind is underserved and growing impatient. The institutions that dismissed this cohort as too complex have started asking the same question Victor asked years ago: where’s my bank?
Ian Rand, CEO, Monument Bank
