RBS’s Bó challenger to Monzo has failed and drops out

RBS launched Bó back in November 19′ to compete with the Monzo and Revolut but now Bó gets discarded.

RBS’s chief executive Alison Rose has informed that Bó will merge with its digital business bank Mettle. She has also denied that this is because of the failure of Bó to attract customers.

Rose argument was that the outbreak of COVID was the reason why she decided to terminate the Bo project: “We decided to refocus our efforts based on the current situation.” 

But Bó has clearly struggled to attract users in comparison with other challengers. Bó has around 11,000 customers, mostly “friends and family” of the bank, who RBS will “continue to support”.

This is not much considering the amounts of customers other challengers are able to attract. Bó has also struggled with technical glitches and branding issues.

With the launch of Bó the CEO, Mark Bailie left. RBS also had to reissue thousands of cards that weren’t up with the latest EU regulatory requirements on authentication. The chief product officer left last week.

Read also: Monzo has attracted most people who switched their accounts

“We are prioritising our investment spend across the bank on products and services that allow us to fully support our customers and that’s more critical than ever at this point,” Rose said.

“Bo was something that we were testing and learning from. It was launched in the app store but we undertook a consumer launch to introduce any type of acquisition targets,” she added.