The UK’s neobanks are upping spending on staff costs and marketing costs as the sector continues to mature, even as some corners of the industry face regulatory headwinds.
This challenger banks’ results season saw the fintechs consolidate their profitability streak, with Monzo and Revolut both in the green for the second year running. Neobank Starling also recorded its fourth year in the black, despite regulatory fines eating into its topline.
Now the dust has settled, we dived into their annual results, pulling together data on where and how they’re spending.
All three of the UK’s neobanks have upped spending on operational and/or administrative expenses in the last three years. That’s to be expected for fast-growing companies, barely a decade out of the gate and looking to continue to rapidly develop.
But what are they spending on, and how much has that changed in the past three years? Sifted crunched the numbers to find out.
Monzo
Latest pre-tax profit: £60.9m
Latest revenue: £1.2bn
Latest expenses: £687m
Since its founding in 2015, Monzo has grown to become one of the UK’s most well-known neobanks and has over 12m customers across £16.6bn in deposits. The neobank employs over 3800 people and has made efforts to expand to Ireland and the US in recent years.
Marketing is one of Monzo’s fastest-growing expenses, increasing from £22m in 2023 to £97m in 2025 — a 340% increase. Personnel costs are Monzo’s largest expense, with £353m spent on employees in the financial year of 2025, compared to the £175m spent in 2023. Technology costs have also close to doubled in the past three years, increasing from £30m in 2023 to £59m in 2025.
The fintech has also upped spending on customer account operating costs, going from £53m in 2023 to £96m in 2025. Included within this cost is the amount Monzo compensated customers for fraud and other dispute losses, which increased by £15.8m (84%) to £34.6m from £18.8m, the fintech said in its annual report. Since last October, payment service providers have been required to compensate APP fraud victims up to £85k within five days after the Payments Service Regulator rolled out new regulation last year.
Revolut
Latest pre-tax profit: £1.1bn
Latest revenue: £3.1bn
Latest expenses: £1.4bn
Founded in 2015 by former Credit Suisse employees Nik Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko, Revolut started life as a travel finance app, before branching out into product verticals such as crypto trading, telecoms and even pet insurance.
The fintech now employs more than 10k people and has more than 50m users — far outranking rivals Monzo and Starling. So it’s somewhat expected that it’s spending far more than its counterparts, with spending on staff more than doubling in the past three years.
Outside of employee expenditure, the fintech has also revved up its focus on advertising and marketing, increasing from £129m in 2022 to £359m in 2024. Revolut attributed its marketing costs to spending on sponsorships and events, such as its Revolutionaries event in November, which featured panels hosted by sports pundit Alex Scott, a pitch session with Storonsky and Dragons Den’s Steven Bartlett, as well as a performance from popstar Charli xcx.
Starling
Latest pre-tax profit: £223m
Latest revenue: £714m
Latest expenses: £460m
Out of the three, Starling has arguably had the most upheaval this year, and the figures on its operating costs illustrate that.
Founded by banking veteran Anne Boden in 2015, Starling banks and lends to both retail customers and SMEs and is one of the UK’s largest neobanks, with more than 4m customers and £12bn in deposits.
Boden resigned as CEO in 2023 and from its board in 2024, before Raman Bhatia, previously head of energy firm OVO, replaced her. Since then, Bhatia has been on a hiring spree — some new additions to his c-suite include ex-NatWest exec Raghu Narula, former TSB business banking executive Adeel Hyder as managing director of SME banking and ex-Expedia exec Michele Rousseau as chief marketing officer. As such, spending on staff has more than doubled in the past three years from £136m in 2023 to just over £300m in 2025.
It’s also reckoned with so-called “legacy issues” in its latest results. Those include an anti-money laundering fine of £29m levied by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the UK’s financial regulatory body, and a £28m provision after the fintech identified a small number of loans on its books from the Bounce Back Loan Scheme (BBLS), which did not comply with the government guarantee requirement.
As a result, it opted to remove the guarantee and take on the financial hit itself. In total, that cost the fintech £57m this year, causing profits at the neobank to slump by a quarter.
Out of the three, Starling is the only neobank to decrease spend on marketing, falling from £29m in 2023 to £13m this financial year. However, this could be attributed to a change in the way the neobank accounted for costs — £11.6m of costs relating to onboarding of customers were taken from marketing and put into a new category of card and onboarding costs, its latest results said.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/neobanks-spending/
