Does Xinja’s downfall mean neobanks are dead?

Rewind to this time last year, and so-called neobanks were getting a lot of attention.

The big four were ‘dinosaurs’ that were burdened with’ old-fashioned’ costs like physical banking branches, accepting cheques and employing thousands of staff. Not to mention the recently-revealed mountain of misconduct charges that had just come out of the 2018 banking royal commission.

To this day, it’s arguable that few of the ASX’s financial institutions, such as AMP Limited (ASX: AMP) and Westpac Banking Corp (ASX: WBC) have yet to fully recover. This was a sector, a comfortable oligopoly, that was ripe for disruption. Or so we were told.

The last few years have seen the rise of the ‘neobank’ – a slimmed-down, tech-based…