Exclusive: Jaja restarts onboarding of waitlist customers after 14-month hiatus

Over a year after AltFi exclusively reported that Jaja Finance had paused the onboarding of new customers, it appears the challenger credit card is starting to resume the process.

Jaja stopped onboarding new customers in June 2020 in order to deal with a huge influx of accounts migrating over from its £530m acquisition of the Bank of Ireland’s UK credit card businesses, which included Post Office and AA-branded credit cards.

The migration of some 500,000 customers saw Jaja face complaints and new challenges, with David Chan, the former CEO of German alternative lender Monedo, joining as the new CEO of Jaja in October 2020 to scale up firm’s tech.

Now Jaja appears to be ready to crack on with its initial plan to launch a challenger credit card, as it started writing to new customers on its 6,000+ waitlist this week inviting them to “be amongst the first to apply”.

The email was seen by AltFi and entitled “join Jaja 2.0”, said over the coming months Jaja will be announcing “new features” as well as “other exciting developments in Jaja’s path to becoming the UK’s best digital credit provider”.

Jaja is offering customers a credit card managed entirely through its mobile app with 18.9 per cent representative APR with no overseas spending fees, the app also includes the ability to freeze and unfreeze the card, as well as spending analytics.

Jaja was founded back in 2015 by three Norwegian entrepreneurs Per Elvebakk, Jostein Svendsen and Kyrre Riksen on a mission to shake up the British credit card market.

After initially raising moderate funding amounts with £4.4m from Pollen Street Capital and the Blystad Group and crowdfunding an additional £5m in 2018 with help from Celeres Investments, Jaja in 2019 brought in US investment house giants KKR and Centerbridge Partners for its all-cash £530m acquisition of the Bank of Ireland’s UK credit card portfolio.