We talk to Monument, a "challenger" bank or "neobank" that has targeted a mass-affluent segment which it says is inadequately served by traditional lenders in the UK.

The recent move by Coutts to raise its minimum wealth threshold has prompted a new UK bank that focuses on mass-affluent clients to highlight a significant market gap. 

Ian Rand (pictured below), CEO of UK-based Monument, which aims to cater for the mass-affluent segment, says the kind of decision that Coutts has taken vindicates the need for newer business models. The term “mass-affluent” typically refers to those with investable wealth from $250,000 to $1 million.

Ian Rand 

“You see what is happening to the mass affluent segment – a group that has got money and got better products and services in every area of their lives. And yet this is not so for financial services,” he told WealthBriefing in an interview. Rand said the UK’s mass-affluent segment is worth about £9 trillion ($12.14 trillion). 

“There is more wealth in the mass-affluent segment than in ultra-high net worth and retail together…it is huge. Unfortunately, big banks realised they could make money from it by not serving it very well,” Rand said. 

In the past, it was easy for banks to earn a return by enabling clients to keep “lazy balances” of cash on deposit, he said. “People are frustrated and they are going looking.”

Coutts, owned by NatWest Group, has raised the minimum wealth threshold on new clients to £3 million ($4.05 million) from £1 million. Clients who would otherwise have considered opening an account with the UK bank – which is reputed to have the British monarch as its client – will no longer be able to do so if they are under the £3 million mark, although this news service understands that there is some flexibility around it. The change was first published back in November 2025.

What is needed is for financial firms to offer more to such clients, using modern technology tools to move clients’ deposits to where they can earn the highest returns, Monument’s Rand said. (He referred to his firm’s work in developing what are called “sweep accounts”). Monument has just under 100,000 clients in the UK. When the bank started out, the team expected that clients would on average have about £28,000 on deposit, each, but in fact it is closer to £60,000. (The minimum is £25,000).

Partnering with Firenze, a specialist, the firm has developed a Lombard lending offering where the interest rates and ratios are competitive with more conventional Lombard offerings, he said. Getting its Financial Conduct Authority clearance in November 2021, Monument has launched a range of services since then.

Segment strains
In an October 2023 report, Citi Ventures, the venture capital arm of Citigroup, said that even the lower reaches of the high net worth market (“millionaires next door”) are underserved, given that rising cost pressures are prompting banks to raise their minimums. (See an analysis here.)

If the financial market has a binary option of retail (highly digital, affordable and plain vanilla) at one end, and private banking (complex offerings, bespoke investments, concierge services, lots of in-person RM contact, structuring advice, etc) on the other, this means that a person on their way up the wealth scale faces a sudden jump from one level to a different one. There is no “in-between.” This is a jarring experience when onboarding, different scrutiny and complete changes in offerings are involved. 

Getting the mass-affluent market right is potentially lucrative: “With nearly $27 trillion in assets – almost 32 per cent of total HNWI wealth – and a large and increasing population base, the affluent segment dominates a sizeable chunk of the wealth pyramid,” Capgemini said in its World Wealth Report for 2023. 

The consultancy even came up with the idea of “wealth-as-a-service” (WaaS) to explain how the mass-affluent market can be served. 

There are options. UBS launched wealth management services in October 2022 for affluent wealth band clients in China via its WE.UBS digital platform, for example. Canada’s Wellington-Altus, which this new service has interviewed about its business model, says 80 per cent of its market is mass-affluent.

One Geneva-based private bank, for example, told this publication that it had shut its doors to such clients, sadly, because they weren’t profitable. Rising regulations and technology costs mean that the minimums of investable assets keep rising. Even the $1 million minimum that Capgemini still uses (it has used it for over 20 years) to define “high net worth” looks seriously out of date, given the ravages of inflation.