Ex-Robinhood employees launch money transfer fintech Atlantic Money

Atlantic Money, a money transfer fintech founded by former Robinhood employees Neeraj Baid and Patrick Kavanagh, emerged from stealth today, pitching itself as a second-generation challenger to Wise, PayPal and Revolut.

While at Robinhood, both Baid and Kavanagh were involved in the US broker’s international projects, where they were tasked with researching expansion into Europe. Although Robinhood ultimately decided to abandon its UK launch, the two say this experience was what ultimately sparked an interest in launching a remittance fintech catering to the UK market. 

At launch, the service will initially be available to UK residents looking to move sums of £1000 to £1 million to nine other currencies — including US dollars, Australian dollars and euros. 

In the crowded UK money transfer market, they say that their product stands out as it’s focused on doing one job well — “we’re not interested in building a super-app,” Baid says — and has a fixed fee of £3. The founders say they’re able to do this by connecting their customers to an institutional-grade currency transfer solution via its app.

“Our fees are low,” Baid said in an interview. “Especially if you get into the £1000s  you’re looking at 50-80% savings compared to anybody else in the market, which is something we’re incredibly proud of — we’re also profitable on every transfer.” 

Looking to crypto 

Having worked on Robinhood Crypto — Baid says he was the deciding force behind putting dogecoin on the platform — Kavanagh says they can imagine a world in which they would consider expanding to include crypto. Competitor TransferGo previously told The Block that it looked at stablecoin transfers for business-to-business use cases in Africa. 

“One of the first questions we have is can crypto make money transfer faster, cheaper and easier. The answer from the research we have so far is: not yet” says Kavanagh. “But we’re tool-agnostic, so if crypto solves the problem we’re happy to do it.”