The Momentum is with MODE
“…The recent MODE fundraising was done because of demand. We literally had people knocking on the door…”
Just four months after listing, Mode Global Holdings raised £6million in a materially oversubscribed placing. The reason wasn’t to clear a seller or for urgent funding requirements. It was new money.
When Mode listed in October it did so as the first LSE-listed fintech group with a consumer-focused digital asset. At the time Gervais Williams of Premier Miton was the only institutional fund manager of note that ‘got’ what the company was about. He took part then as he did in February’s placing which was done at speed to give institutions a second chance to participate. Williams put in more money and this time was joined by the likes of Canaccord.
They understand what executive chairman Jonathan Rowland and his team are striving to achieve at speed. The creation of an ecosystem of modern financial services; something similar to Alipay in China with its one stop shop view with one application to do everything in your financial services world.
“We’re going to launch our payments in Q2 built on open banking protocols,” says Rowland. “We’re just one of the payment alternatives on various platforms, but ours is the first open banking deployed solution for the merchant in the UK.”
Mode’s commission is far less than that of MasterCard for example, and also allows merchants to use bitcoin or offer customers bitcoin rewards.
Rowland is keen to stress that Mode is not a pure bitcoin play and never was. But he is pleased that since IPO, the company allocated up to 10% of its cash reserves to purchase bitcoin and adopt it as a treasury reserve asset. When bitcoin was being brought into the company’s treasury last October, it was a mere $12,000. Rowland however shares Elon Musk’s view about bitcoin; that it is a utility, and not withstanding price fluctuations in the cryptocurrency it’s not a bubble but is here to stay.
Listen to Jonathan tell Sarah Lowther about the successful uptake of the recently launched Android app, the sustainability of the business and why he believes the biggest companies in the financial world are being built now.
Watch Jonathan talk to Proactive UK’s Katie Pilbeam about the financial ecosystem the company is creating including a new-breed financial app for every day investors to easily buy, hold and grow Bitcoin.
The author was remunerated but does not hold shares in the company
