The UK challenger bank ecosystem has spent a decade proving that a financial services company can be rebuilt entirely inside a mobile app. Revolut started as a currency exchange tool and has since added stock trading, crypto, travel insurance, and more than 50 other features. Starling built out a full consumer and SME banking stack. Tide went deep into the business banking space.
The logic driving all of it is the same. The more essential services a platform bundles into one place, the harder it becomes for a user to leave. Every new feature adds a reason to open the app, a switching cost that makes churning feel disruptive, and a revenue stream that improves the platform’s unit economics. The race to become the one app a user can’t live without has defined UK fintech for years.
Mobile connectivity is the next feature in that race. And the infrastructure barrier that kept it off most fintech roadmaps has now been removed. Gigs is the company that removed it.
Why are mobile subscriptions the feature UK fintechs have always wanted but never shipped?
The features that have driven the strongest retention gains across the UK challenger bank space share a common characteristic: they are things users need constantly, not occasionally. Products that generate daily or weekly engagement rather than the monthly check-in pattern of most financial tools.
Mobile connectivity is the most extreme version of that. It is something every user interacts with dozens of times a day, every day, without exception. A banking app gets opened when someone needs to check a balance or make a transfer. A phone plan is powering their connected experience every waking hour. The touchpoint density is incomparable.
According to McKinsey, multi-product financial customers have 25% lower churn rates than single-product customers. For a fintech trying to deepen its relationship with users it already has, adding mobile subscriptions to the product stack is one of the most direct ways to move that number.
So why have mobile services consistently been the feature that UK challenger banks talk about but never ship? The answer is not that it is technically impossible or even uniquely difficult. It is that launching a mobile service requires an entirely different category of expertise that fintech companies simply don’t have in-house: carrier negotiations, telecom regulatory compliance, number porting infrastructure, and consumer support for a category of query that has nothing in common with banking.
For a company whose core competency is financial product design and user experience, building all of that from scratch is a different kind of undertaking entirely.
What was the structural barrier, and how did Gigs remove it?
To launch a mobile service, a company needs to integrate with a carrier network. If working directly with multiple carriers, that also means separate contracts with each, separate commercial and technical integrations, and ongoing management of each relationship independently. Teams can spend months negotiating the contracts and corresponding commitments to the carriers.
For a fintech’s engineering team with no telecom background, that becomes an organisational challenge as much as it is a technical one.
That is just the starting point. Operating a mobile service in the UK also means navigating Ofcom’s regulatory requirements, building number porting infrastructure so users can bring their phone numbers to the new provider, and creating a consumer support capability for a completely new category of problems. Coverage issues, roaming queries, and plan disputes have nothing in common with the support tickets a fintech normally handles. They require different tooling, different expertise, and different processes.
Put it all together and a UK fintech attempting to build mobile plans in-house was looking at a realistic timeline of 12 to 18 months, a cost measured in millions, and a permanent operational burden that would require specialist telecom headcount to maintain indefinitely. For most fintechs, regardless of how strong the strategic case was, the economics simply did not add up.
Gigs was built to change that calculation entirely.
The company sits between a fintech’s product and the carrier network, bringing the best carrier relationships globally into a single API. That API gives partners access to local phone plans in more than 50 countries and roaming across 195 markets. Gigs also acts as Carrier of Record under Ofcom’s virtual mobile network operator framework, which means partners don’t need to complete their own regulatory registrations or build compliance infrastructure before going live. Automated tax remittance, number porting, and consumer support tooling are all handled by Gigs. The fintech owns the product and the user relationship. Gigs owns the telecom infrastructure underneath.
The result is that mobile plans went from being a feature only telecom-native companies could realistically ship to one that any UK fintech with a product team and an existing user base can put on its roadmap.
Why is the UK market particularly well-suited to fintech-owned mobile services?
The UK happens to be one of the best possible markets for fintech-owned mobile services to take hold. Smartphone penetration reached 94% in 2024, the highest in Europe according to Ofcom. Digital banking adoption has also outpaced most comparable markets: 88% of UK adults now use some form of online or remote banking, with three in four using mobile banking specifically, up from three in five just two years ago. And UK consumers have already demonstrated a strong appetite for consolidating financial and lifestyle services into as few apps as possible, with nearly half having opened a digital-only bank account and two-thirds either having done so or planning to.
The competitive intensity of the challenger bank space makes the timing particularly acute. In a market where Revolut, Starling, and a growing cohort of vertical fintechs are all chasing the same digitally native users, the platforms that add mobile plans first will build switching costs and recurring revenue that later movers will struggle to close.
The distribution dynamic also works strongly in fintechs’ favour. Traditional carriers spend £400 to £900 per subscriber competing for new customers through TV advertising, billboards, and retail promotions, starting from zero with every acquisition. A Starling user who receives a push notification about a competitive mobile plan from an app they already open every day is in a completely different decision-making context. They are not being sold to by a brand they don’t know. They’re hearing from a platform they already trust, about a service they already need.
That trust changes the acquisition dynamic fundamentally. Users who switch to a branded plan from their neobank are not just buying a cheaper phone plan. They are deepening a relationship. Gigs helps partners structure their plans and go-to-market strategy to capture that value, while keeping final pricing decisions with the partner. The goal is mobile services that strengthen the product relationship and contribute real margin, not a race to the bottom on price.
What does the build actually look like for a UK fintech?
For a product team that has accepted the strategic case and wants to understand what building on Gigs actually involves, the answer is considerably more manageable than the traditional alternative suggests.
A fully white-labelled mobile service embedded in an existing app typically takes six to eight weeks to build on Gigs. That fits inside a standard product development cycle. It does not require standing up a specialist telecom team, signing carrier contracts, or navigating Ofcom before writing a single line of code.
The engineering team works with the Gigs API, a single developer-friendly interface covering carrier integrations, subscription management, number porting, and eSIM provisioning across multiple carriers and markets. It is designed for product engineers, not for telecom specialists.
For teams that want to test the market before committing to a full build, Gigs Connect offers a faster path. It handles plan creation, checkout, and porting flows out of the box, and can be fully branded to match the fintech’s look and feel, enabling a live proof of concept in days. Real subscriber data and conversion signals come in before the deeper integration begins, which means the business case builds itself.
Beyond the technical layer, Gigs provides go-to-market support calibrated specifically to the UK market. Pricing benchmarks drawn from UK consumer expectations, switching incentive strategies that account for the dynamics of the UK carrier market, and onboarding best practices from prior UK and European launches on the platform.
The window for being an early mover on mobile subscriptions in the UK fintech market is open, but it won’t stay that way. The challenger banks that move first will set the category expectation, capture the retention uplift, and make it significantly harder for competitors to position a me-too mobile product as a reason to switch. Gigs has already done the infrastructure work that makes moving fast possible: the carrier relationships are in place, the compliance is handled, and the launch timeline is measured in weeks.
The only remaining decision is whether to be the platform that defines what fintech-owned mobile services look like in the UK, or the one that follows.
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