Virtual monobank will keep the possibility of card-not-present transactions in only three countries in Africa: South Africa, Egypt and Morocco, the bank’s co-founder Oleg Gorokhovsky said.
“Due to the increased risk of fraud and to strengthen the fight against illegal gambling traffic, we are closing all card-not-present transactions in Africa, with the exception of South Africa, Egypt and Morocco,” he wrote in Telegram on Friday.
According to monobank on its website, it currently serves 7.439 million customers.
The National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine has included the internet broker EXANTE (IEXTi Cyprus) in the sub-sanction list, in connection with which monobank and investment company “Univer Capital” suggest their clients who bought foreign securities through this broker to urgently close their accounts, as otherwise these investments will be blocked until the removal of sanctions.
“Although Univer Capital’s agreement is formally with another broker, they are nonetheless related entities. For the investor, such sanctions could mean a temporary blocking of assets and access to the account. Accordingly, we recommend all our clients with a portfolio of securities purchased through a broker EXANTE, urgently (today) to close all positions and withdraw funds, because tomorrow access to the accounts may be closed, “- said in a statement of the investment company.
“The SNBO has just put EXANTE, which is a broker in our investment application, on the sanctions list. In this regard: all clients who have positions in securities in mono invest will be notified within an hour, in which we will offer to agree to close the position today and return the money to the card,” mono invest co-owner of monobank Oleg Gorokhovsky addressed to clients.
According to him, the positions of only those clients who in the message will click “I do not agree” will not be closed. “Access to their shares and the money spent on them will be possible only after the sanctions of the National Security and Defence Council are lifted,” Gorokhovsky warned.
Virtual monobank, as well as other banks, will return arrests temporarily removed after the start of the war on the funds in the accounts of some customers in connection with the entry into force of the law “On amendments to some laws of Ukraine on certain specific features of the organization of compulsory execution of court decisions and decisions of other bodies during martial law”.
“Since the law came into force, we have to return the arrests that were removed during martial law. This will affect ~436 thousand of our clients,” said the co-founder of the bank Oleg Gorokhovsky.
He specified that this law cancels the action of the Cabinet of Ministers, which removed the arrests of the executive service in the amount of less than 100 thousand UAH during martial law.
“The new law allows customers with arrests to use the amount of two minimum wages (13.4 thousand UAH) on the condition that the client applied to the executor and the latter, in turn, sent us a resolution to remove the arrest in the amount of 13.4 thousand UAH on one of the accounts of the client,” – said Gorokhovsky.
According to him, nothing can be done about it, and all banks will comply with this norm.
At the beginning of March this year, Gorokhovsky said that the number of bank customers exceeded 7 million last week.
monobank, which is one of the leaders in attracting individuals to the domestic government bond (OVGZ) market, has added the first foreign currency government bonds to its mobile application in the investment section.
According to the information in the application, customers will be able to purchase dollar bonds maturing on April 27, 2023 and euro bonds maturing on December 1 this year with a yield of 3.71% and 2.41% per annum, respectively.
The last additional placement of these dollar bonds by the Ministry of Finance took place on August 30 at a rate of 4% per annum, and bonds in euro – on May 24 at a rate of 2.5% per annum.
In general, 9,195 dollar and 5,491 euro securities are available for sale in the application, the par value of which is $1,000 and EUR1,000, respectively, with a total volume of issues of 494,596 and 110,026 pieces, respectively.
As reported, the possibility of such trading in currency government bonds appeared after the National Bank of Ukraine in mid-July granted the Settlement Center for Contracts in Financial Markets (RC, Kyiv), which carries out the clearing activities of the central counterparty, a license to carry out foreign exchange transactions. Thanks to this, on July 26, the RC began making settlements in foreign currency on transactions with foreign currency government bonds, and already at the end of that month – early August, such transactions began to be concluded on exchanges.
The cost of a virtual monobank is more than $1 billion, bank’s co-founder Oleh Horokhvsky has said.
“Ukrainian monobank is already worth more than $1 billion dollars and is not for sale,” he said on his Telegram channel on Sunday.
According to him, with such an assessment, not a single Ukrainian bank can technically buy monobank.
“Only a consortium of foreign investment funds can handle this ‘candy,” Horokhvsky said.
Monobank was founded in January 2017 by former top managers of PrivatBank Horokhovsky, Dmytro Dubilet and Mykhailo Rohalsky. By October 2017, the bank issued the first thousand credit cards, in February 2018 it started to raise deposits in hryvnia.
The number of monobank clients in November 2020 increased to 3 million people.
The co-founders of retail mobile bank Monobank Dmytro Dubilet, Oleg Gorohovsky and Mykhailo Rogalskiy plans to bring a bank, similar to Monobank, to the U.K. market by the end of the summer of 2019, Dubilet has said in an interview with the Novoye Vremia.Business ezine.
“We are trying to launch a project in England now. It can be called to some extent an analog of Monobank, but there we do it ourselves, without a partner bank. It will be named Koto. Now the key stage of launching a project is obtaining a financial license to be able to run this business independently,” Dubilet said.
According to him, about $1 million has already been spent on the implementation of this project, the project founders plan to invest approximately the same amount additionally.
Dubilet also said that the project is currently at the testing stage. “Now the alpha version is ready, we are engaged in internal testing. I, for example, am already paying for purchases with a Koto card,” he said.
Former top managers of PrivatBank, Gorohovsky, Dmytro Dubilet and Mykhailo Rogalskiy in January 2017 announced their plans to create an IT company, Fintech Band, for the Monobank project. By October 2017, Monobank issued the first thousand credit cards, it began raising deposits in hryvnias in February 2018.
Currently, the Monobank app has two partner banks: Universal Bank (included in the TAS group) and iBox (both are located in Kyiv). The total number of Monobank’s customers is 826,000.
