Monzo’s Mr Tom Blomfield is disrupting banking with his little pink cards, a must-have for millennials and creatives.

It’s a summer afternoon in Shoreditch, east London. I am waiting in the offices of the financial technology startup Monzo, watching a neat young man pass around the lobby in sleek grey Common Projects sneakers as he talks into his Google Pixel phone. “Yes, but I think you’ll find… Well the thing about that is… Actually, we’re expecting…” It is apparent from his tone that this is the man whose company this is, that he has consumed a lot of caffeine and that disrupting the banking industry is not without its vexations.

He finishes the call, disappears into the main office, and then re-emerges one minute later and introduces himself as Mr Tom Blomfield, 31, the founder and CEO of Monzo, an app-based bank that has raised £19.5m in funding, gained 300,000 customers and processed £1.5bn of cash in a little over a year. My immediate urge is to ask him if he’s OK. He seems a bit stressed. “I can’t remember what I was doing, to be honest,” says Mr Blomfield. He shows me the calendar on his phone. It is so crammed with appointments, it looks like a game of Tetris gone badly awry. “We’re doing the first public roll-out of our current account tonight,” he says. “But actually, I’m always like this.” No one said launching a bank would be all jam and crumpets.

London’s emerging financial technology, or “fintech”, sector is full of clever people doing fiddly things with cash and code (his UK-based rivals in this field include Revolut, Tandem and TransferWise). But Mr Blomfield has done something few others have. He has somehow made personal finance palatable to millennials. You might have seen one of your early-adopter friends flashing a fluoro pink Monzo pre-paid Beta debit card (the colour is officially “hot coral”). They might have gushed about how great it is that they can track their disposable income (you pre-load cash onto it via the app). Hell, if you’re a budgeting hipster such as Ms Lily Allen, you might have raved about how much you love yours. “The bank of the future @getmondo is coming!” she tweeted last summer, much to the surprise and delight of Mr Blomfield.