The Cash Management Account Blueprint: How European Fintechs Rediscovered a 47-Year-Old Playbook

There’s been a long-standing debate within the fintech community on the efficacy of neobanks, particularly given its mixed history in the US and Europe. Two of the authorities on this topic, David Brear and Jason Bates of 11:FS had spent years inside the traditional banking system before becoming part of the fintech revolution that would reshape European finance. Brear had worked at Barclays and HSBC, while Bates had co-founded Monzo before starting 11:FS. When I worked with them in 2022, their insights consistently came back to the same theme, namely that successful fintech companies weren't just building better technology—they were asking fundamentally different questions about what customers actually wanted from financial services.As Bates put it in a Forbes interview: "The challenger banks didn't win by having better technology. They won by starting with the customer problem and working backwards."

The approach sounded familiar. Starting with customer needs rather than industry structure. Integrating services around outcomes rather than products. Making financial services feel helpful rather than extractive.

Where had I heard this before?

Then it hit me: Thomas Chrystie's 1977 presentation to Merrill Lynch about the Cash Management Account.

The Original Financial Services Integration

The CMA was revolutionary because it integrated separate financial services around what customers actually wanted: competitive returns on cash, convenient transactions, investment management, and credit access—all in one account with a single statement.

Before the CMA, wealthy investors had to manage multiple relationships: banks for checking, money market funds for yield, brokers for investments, and separate credit lines for liquidity. Merrill Lynch asked a simple question: why should customers manage the complexity of financial services industry structure?

The CMA eliminated that complexity by building around customer needs rather than regulatory silos.

The European Revolution Follows the Same Script

Fast-forward to 2017, and Anne Boden launches Starling Bank with remarkably similar thinking. After 30 years inside traditional banking at RBS, Lloyds, and Standard Chartered, she'd seen the industry's dysfunction from the inside.

As she told the Financial Times: "The big banks have got legacy technology that's decades old... they're trying to digitize that rather than starting from scratch."

Starling's approach was pure CMA thinking: real-time transaction processing, automatic spending insights, marketplace access to best-in-class savings and investment products, and fee-free international usage—all integrated around helping customers succeed financially.

Monzo took community engagement even further. Their coral cards became social proof of a movement. Their crowdfunding approach turned customers into stakeholders. Their "Making Monzo" forum made product development transparent and collaborative.

But the core strategy remained the same: integrate financial services around customer outcomes rather than industry convenience.

The Pattern Spreads Globally

Revolut applied the CMA playbook to international finance, integrating banking, investing, crypto, and currency exchange for global customers. N26 focused on operational excellence, proving that superior execution of integrated banking could compete across European markets. SoFi used student loan refinancing as a gateway to comprehensive financial relationships, explicitly referencing the CMA model in their platform strategy.

Each company succeeded by asking the same question Merrill Lynch asked in 1977: What do customers actually want to accomplish, and how can we integrate financial services to help them succeed?

Why Traditional Banks Couldn't Respond

Traditional banks faced what I call "the constraint of their own success." Legacy systems built for product silos couldn't easily integrate customer experiences. Organizational structures created conflicting incentives between departments. Revenue models depended on the friction that integrated approaches eliminated.

Challenger banks had the freedom to ask first-principles questions: What would banking look like if we built it today? How can we eliminate friction that doesn't serve customers? What would we build if we weren't constrained by legacy decisions?

The Next Evolution

The success of integrated neobanks is creating the foundation for embedded finance. Just as the CMA integrated separate financial products, the next wave will integrate financial services with healthcare, real estate, business operations, and other life domains.

The companies that master this evolution—combining first-principles customer thinking with modern technology—will define the future of not just banking, but every industry where customer needs have been subordinated to industry structure.

The Lesson for Financial Entrepreneurs

The retail banking revolution demonstrates that the most successful financial innovations start with customer needs rather than industry categories. The pattern is always the same: understand what customers actually want to accomplish, ignore industry constraints during ideation, then build integrated solutions around complete customer journeys.

Forty-seven years after Thomas Chrystie's breakthrough, the CMA playbook remains the gold standard for financial services innovation. The question isn't whether you're building better financial products—it's whether you're thinking deeply enough about what your customers actually want to accomplish.

Read the full analysis of how European fintechs rediscovered the CMA playbook, including detailed case studies of Starling, Monzo, Revolut, N26, and SoFi.