Currensea

Idea

Introduction

Spending abroad should be a breeze.

That’s why we launched Currensea, the UK’s first direct debit travel card—empowering customers to spend abroad as they do at home, without the bank fees.

We calculate that UK cardholders pay £2.7 billion in bank fees every year when spending abroad. One way to stop these charges is to switch to a challenger bank, but that means having to run a second bank account. This might be why we estimate that only 0.2% of UK adults switch each year.

Those days are over. Currensea bridges the gap.

Forget managing another account, constantly topping up and losing track of your balances. Currensea makes it hassle-free! The card seamlessly connects to an existing bank account, and simply removes the bank fees when you spend overseas.

We’ve changed the goalposts here, so we thought it only fair to share the benefits. Hence we’ve opened up the platform for other organisations to use, mixing profit with purpose, and generating revenue streams for great causes:

Substantial accomplishments to date

As seen on TV

Here’s Harry Wallop in TV’s Gadget Show, giving his views on Currensea and why it’s better than the alternatives:

Monetisation strategy

Currensea has multiple revenue streams:

• Card interchange (paid by the merchant when the card is used)
• Card FX (a 0.5% spread on our Essential card)
• Subscriptions (the annual charges for our premium and Elite cards)
• Transfer FX (a 0.5% spread on international transfers)

But also low costs:

Holding a customer's money is expensive. Regulation, financial crime, cyber etc. The risks are just so high. We’ve built our technology to be as secure as any bank, but unlike challenger banks or pre-pay cards, we don’t hold our customers money, so we don’t have those massive costs. We reckon high street banks are pretty good at doing that, they’re just not so good at some of the other things.

Use of proceeds

The funds raised in this investment round, which includes this Seedrs campaign, will be used predominantly in two areas:

User Acquisition (60%) - Currensea is scaling rapidly through cost-effective core digital channels and a referral rate that is now over 50% of sign-ups and increasing monthly. Now we plan to take growth to the next level, powering an ever-growing list of partner brands while broadening market awareness of Currensea.

Product (40%) - Building on our Open Banking platform, we have an ambitious and exciting roadmap.

• Opening up the platform to an even wider set of use cases and partners
• Broadening the base Currensea proposition to give customers an even more compelling set of features - in areas such as spending at home, transferring money, and a whole host of others.