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Rise of the fintechs: Barclays divisional legal head leaves for Monzo bank

Barclays’ lead legal counsel for client and customer experience Dean Nash has joined fintech startup Monzo bank as head of compliance.

Prior to joining Barclays, Nash (pictured) was an in-house lawyer at Lloyds Banking Group. Monzo, which is an app-only bank, was valued at £50m in October after a £4.8m funding round.

The start-up, which was formerly known as Mondo, aims to create a digital-only bank for mobile users that provides instant notifications of transactions and balances, a breakdown of spending across the month and a detailed feed of what money has been spent on. It gained a banking licence in August this year.

Monzo, along with Atom Bank, Tandem and Starling are new app-only banks or ‘neobanks’ which do not have any walk-in branches.

In July Barclays appointed former Gibson Dunn & Crutcher partner Mark Shelton as general counsel (GC) of Barclays’ corporate & international business following a ring-fencing restructure which saw the bank split its legal team to create two new divisions – the other being Barclays UK.

In addition, Shelton will also be the GC for Barclays Corporate and International Americas and its separately capitalised holding company, established in the US on 1 July 2016.

Earlier this year, Baker McKenzie hired the bank’s global competition head Nicola Northway, less than a year after it hired Barclays Bank’s global head of financial crime Jonathan Peddie. This was following a spate of exits for the bank last year which saw Barclays’ M&A chief Khasruz Zaman depart for Simmons & Simmons, the bank’s EMEA general counsel Erica Handling switching to funds manager BlackRock and US GC Carlos Pelayo moving to Merrill Lynch.

kathryn.mccann@legalease.co.uk

Read more in: ‘City firms poised to ride fintech wave’