Shruti Rai/Novus
News Digital Banking Savings And Investment
Novus pivots to B2B, shuts consumer business
The Liverpool-based fintech company set out on a mission to link consumer spending to ethical brands and projects. Now it plans to help larger financial organisations with their ESG goals.
Novus is shutting its consumer-facing debit card product, and pivoting to B2B to support larger companies with “their ESG transformation journeys”.
The company, which claims to be the first UK-certified B corp in the neobanking space launched its spending card into a crowded market at the start of 2022.
It offered customers cashback rewards when they spent with any of its c.130 “ethical” brand partners - companies such as HelloFresh and Just Eat.
“Novus has been about using the power of money to create a positive impact at scale. We’ve recently made the tough decision to pivot our offering from B2C to B2B to be able to increase the speed and scale at which we can achieve our mission,” the company said in a statement.
“This means we’ll be working alongside existing financial institutions in the future rather than continuing to offer our own digital banking service to individual customers,” it added.
The company's chief growth officer Shruti Rai (pictured) told AltFi in July: "It's definitely a crowded market, there are so many UK neobanks.”
“But I feel like the main philosophy that a lot of UK banks went live with was to build for everybody and provide like a really cool UX and UI, so you have never have to go to bank branch again...they have not managed to monetise their users as they expected to because obviously a lot of the users of Monzo and Revolut are free and they are losing money on that.”
