Zebank

» see zebank.fr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The man who owns Louis Vuitton decided in 1999 that France needed an internet bank. The project ran inside Europ@web, the internet holding company of Groupe Arnault, under the working name Internet Financial Portal, and somebody came up with Zebank that September. Dexia, the Franco-Belgian bank, took the other twenty percent. The launch was planned for early 2000 and did not happen until February 2001.

What opened was a branchless bank trying to sell everything at once, from current accounts and savings up to share dealing on eight markets, over the web or by telephone. The hook was a savings account paying 5.10 percent and a Visa card at fifty francs a year. Philippe Jaffré chaired the supervisory board. The French press called it a hyperbanque, a bank laid out like a hypermarket.

Fifteen months later it belonged to a British company and the name was coming down. That is a short life even by the standards of the period, and it is shorter than it looks, because the money had been going out since the summer of 1999 with nothing arriving until 2001.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the hyperbank ~

Customers did turn up, which is the part people forget. The bank claimed 17,000 by the end of June 2001. By January 2002 the British press put it at 70,000 customers holding 120,000 accounts, and the figure at the end of March was 89,000 customers and 144,000 accounts, served by a staff of around 300. Those are real numbers for a branchless bank in its first year.

They were nowhere near enough. The capital figures reported at the time do not agree with each other, from 115 million euros of own funds quoted at the launch to 180 million by that autumn, but every version is more than twenty times what the business eventually sold for. By October 2001 the trade press was reporting that the Arnault camp was looking for a way out and that Dexia was rethinking its internet strategy.

~ eight million, then five point five ~

Egg, the British internet bank owned by Prudential, confirmed it was in talks on 21 January 2002 and announced the deal nine days later. The price was eight million euros. By the time the sale completed on 28 May, an audit had knocked 2.5 million off it and the final figure was 5.5 million euros, about 3.5 million pounds. Egg separately repaid 19.3 million pounds of share capital to the former shareholders.

Egg was not buying a bargain so much as a license and a customer list. Its own plan was to spend around fifteen million pounds on development and fifty million on marketing, and to reach a million French customers in three years. It got nowhere near, announced its withdrawal from France on 13 July 2004, and broke the operation up: the cards and loans to Banque Accord, the savings and brokerage accounts to ING Direct. The French adventure had cost Egg about 240 million euros.

~ the week the site changed its name ~

The brand's actual last day is not in any press release, it is in the archived copies of the website. On 20 July 2002 zebank.fr was still bouncing visitors to the Zebank homepage. By late September it was a redirect to Egg's French site, which had gone live on the 27th. French sources put the change at September 2002, and the web agrees to within a week.

There is a postscript the domain tells by itself. zebank.fr answers today with a perfectly ordinary French personal-finance blog, full of guides to savings and tax, unconnected to the bank and claiming no connection. A name bought for 5.5 million euros in 2002 was free for the taking a decade later, and whoever took it is using it to explain money to readers who would not recognize the name of Arnault's hyperbank.

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