B100 is a Spanish digital bank launched by ABANCA in 2024, focusing on the concept of healthy banking. Qorus' Boris Plantier speaks with its Executive Director, Jorge Mahía, to learn more about it.
Why did your bank decide to launch a neobank and how did it proceed?
B100 comes to complement ABANCA in strategy, offer and target; it is a complement to create value for the entire group. At B100, we target a younger (both in age and attitude) and digital customer, one with a different view on the role of banks in particular and new business models in general. A customer with a certain alternative, challenging, modern mindset... who believes that things can be done differently.
B100 is born with a clear ambition for rapid growth. We are born with the capability for flexibility and agility, having been designed on a technological architecture adapted to what B100 needs and built on a purpose and corporate values for the year 2024.
ABANCA offers its range of products and services to corporations, companies, SMEs, private banking, businesses and freelancers – while B100 has a clear focus on marketing products for the mass market of digital individual customers. In short, our goal is to complement what ABANCA already has and focus on a target that requires a very specific offer through a single channel: mobile banking.
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How is this neobank positioned? What are its main competitive advantages? How does its offering differ from that of the incumbent bank ABANCA? Is it targeting a different type of customer?
B100 is a digital bank that helps its clients live more consciously and positively, with their money, their health and the planet. It is the first bank in the world to unite financial health (as we are a bank) with a recurring, direct and traceable positive impact on the health of the planet, and also on the health of people. B100 is based on a new banking concept: healthy banking. A mobile-only bank, designed on a unique principle: every functionality must be healthy from its inception.
Our clients set a daily step goal; if they achieve it by walking or running, we automatically transfer money to a high-yield account, our Health Account. The more you walk or run, the more you can save… it’s our way of promoting health through physical activity. Personal health.
And if they pay with our Pay to Save card, we donate 25% of the income we get from that payment to a project that collects and recycles fishing nets from the sea. With each payment, our clients see the grams of plastic they have collected, and the entire B100 community sees the daily amount of plastic we are removing from the sea. Planet health.
There is a third account, our Save Account, which offers a very good yield so that the client can manage their savings: transfer money as and when they wish, create savings pots and goals, and save without noticing through automated saving features. Financial health.
This is our way of understanding healthy banking: our products are designed to help our clients' financial health, of course, but also the health of people and the planet.
How dependent/independent is B100 from ABANCA in terms of technology, management, finance, marketing and distribution?
One of the challenges a neobank faces is the significant investment in technology and building and developing all the required and necessary legacy for a bank. The great advantage of B100 is that we have been able to rely on everything ABANCA can provide us, such as technology and compliance.
Based on this ‘core banking as a service’, we have built a cloud architecture to support the uniqueness of B100: its mobile applications (iOS and Android) and everything related to its products and experience in areas that are not core banking (saving with your physical activity, creating savings goals and pots, saving rules, collecting plastic every time you pay with your card, etc.).
If the design of a new functionality has product implications, ABANCA will have to take action, but there are many other current and future functionalities of B100 that do not need and will not need to rely on ABANCA, giving it considerable autonomy and freedom. From a marketing perspective, B100 builds and positions its brand in a territory distinct from ABANCA, much closer to neobanks, and we develop our entire sales strategy in a completely different manner from ABANCA. Different and complementary, not better.
How successful is B100 so far? What are its main successes? Its main challenges? How do you see it evolving in the next five to ten years?
The reception that B100 is having in the Spanish market is extraordinary. Without a big-bang launch, we are growing month by month beyond our expectations, both in the volume of clients and in the acquisition of deposits, with a very good client profile, clients who also use our card. And we know everything that we are missing and that will come very soon in terms of products. We see great potential that the market will continue to discover.
Our challenges for the coming months are precisely to continue innovating in products and services, consolidating our healthy banking proposition, and developing our brand. We have a long way to go. In the coming years, B100 will be the primary bank for many of its clients because it will have consolidated the differentiating values of its positioning, values that more and more people will share, and will have a wide range of products. Additionally, it will be the perfect complementary offering for those clients who are increasingly in need of a second bank for their daily lives.
More generally, how do you see neobanks competing in the future banking landscape? Do you believe that a Netflix-like or an Amazon-like neobank could fundamentally reshape banking services?
Neobanks will cease to be neobanks and will become banks in the broader sense of the word. I don't believe they will develop a network of branches, but they will certainly develop increasingly sophisticated products, managed 100% digitally, and in some cases with remote support from expert managers. It is also likely that what we consider more traditional banking today will have significantly strengthened its offerings in the mobile application, enhancing the customer experience, its products and functionalities, and offering an extraordinary combination of digital and physical services.
ABANCA is not the only traditional bank to have launched a challenger bank. Read more interviews in this same series.
