Revolut is driving the banking shake-up

Traditional banking has, for some time now, been considered a stale and antiquated industry lacking innovation and the drive to adopt new technologies. So, in the space of five years, a handful of digital challenger banks have appeared on the scene in a bid to disrupt and revolutionise the industry by offering consumers the same simplicity and customer experience as every other industry making strides in the digital universe.

At the forefront of this movement is Revolut, a fintech start-up that has established, in five years, a net worth of $1.7bn and a staff count that has increased 550% since its inception.

Revolut’s country manager for Greece, Cyprus and Malta, Dimitris Litsikakis, tells EGR Technology the company’s ethos is to invest everything into bettering its product. While many of its competitors strive to gain exposure through massive marketing campaigns, this company’s product has received such high praise from its users that most of its customer acquisition is achieved through word of mouth.

So, what’s the secret to the tech behind the start-up’s seismic growth and the widespread praise for its mobile app and digital offering?

EGR Technology: What’s your career background?

Dimitris Litsikakis (DL): I have worked as a community manager for Start-up Grind, and I have also worked in fintech as the head of digital for a company that was going through a digital transformation process for pre-paid cards. So I know fintech. My background is in computer science, so it’s kind of a great mix for Revolut.

EGR Technology: What’s behind Revolut’s immense growth in the past 12 months?

DL: The secret has always been the investment in technology. The main difference between us and other challenger banks is they spend more time devising marketing techniques and burn a lot of money on those campaigns, while we utilise our investors’ money differently and invest solely in technology. We let the product speak for itself. That’s how we’ve reached 2.5 million users in three years – by word of mouth and not spending any money on marketing.  We are completely digital, so we can reduce our costs and can pass all the core savings back to our customer base.

Dimitris Litsakis is Revolut’s country manager for Cyprus, Malta and Greece

EGR Technology: Where do you draw inspiration from in terms of UX and UI?

DL: We built the whole banking experience from the ground up and we hired the best UX/UI people out there. We had many iterations [of the app] before we made it perfect and we continue to make improvements all the time. If you look at our product roadmap, there is a new version of the app every two weeks. It’s incredible and it’s a mix of quality and also speed of execution, because in fintech things change all the time and you have to be on top of it.

Our team is all about execution. We are relentless and we keep pushing the boundaries. We have introduced so many new features in the last six months. We introduced vaults, which is the easiest way to save money before you even know it. We introduced disposable cards, which is the best way to fight online fraud – currently costing up to $1.7bn a year. We then moved onto crypto, and Revolut is the first digital bank to introduce bitcoin, ether, litecoin and ripple. You don’t have to go through dodgy exchanges. It might not be for the advanced traders who like to have their crypto in a cold wallet, but it’s easy and it brings crypto to the masses.

We will try to do the same with the trading platform. We’re trying to democratise investing and remove all the high commissions related to investing. If you have £100 to invest, it costs £10 to buy and £10 to sell, so you’ve already lost 20% of your investment. We’ve slapped down all these fees and tried to make it easier by going beyond the traditional digital wallet. Now we are all about being a platform and introducing so much cool stuff on top of it.

EGR Technology: How quickly do you think the wider banking industry is moving in terms of its technology?

DL: I’m afraid banks are ranking at the very bottom [from a tech perspective]. I can understand some things, like they have legacy systems and it is difficult to do what we are doing because we have never had any legacy tech. But it’s also the culture; it’s very difficult to fight. Many in the industry are very traditional and can’t understand [new movements]. I have spoken to great people from the industry and they are very capable but have told me they have to fight against their fellow team members.

EGR Technology: Banking is more of a traditional industry, but what about payments? That side of the industry seems to be moving more quickly, right?

DL: Payments are something that banks have had the monopoly on for so long and they have been good at introducing hidden fees and finding ways to rip off their clients. We have seen this numerous times in the past, and that’s why they have grown. If you look at our pricing model, it’s completely different. We host events often called ‘Rev Rallies’ and the first question we get asked is, ‘How do you make any money’? That shows how much the mind-set of traditional banks has been transformed into a generic expectation for everyone. We’re trying to turn it around and everyone is surprised.

EGR Technology: Malta is the latest jurisdiction to adopt Revolut. What are you picking up from different markets and how each is moving towards innovation in payments? One example is the Nordics and their BankID authentication system.

DL: Our top three jurisdictions at the moment are the UK, as that’s our base and HQ; France, which we can see great growth in; and also Poland. Poland is an amazing case; people there are hungry for innovation and they get a lot of value from the free currency exchange offering. They have Polish workers in the UK who send money back home and that’s the perfect opportunity for them. Malta has an amazing penetration with almost 10% of the entire population using Revolut. Gibraltar’s penetration is 25%. “We let the product speak for itself. That’s how we’ve reached 2.5m users in three years – by word of mouth and not spending any money on marketing”.

People get on Revolut for different reasons: in Greece, for example, two years ago when a lot of people were trying to find different ways to move their money because of the capital controls, Revolut provided a solution and that’s why Greece was our fifth-biggest market at the time. For Italy, they are still a card-based society, but Spain has now passed the landmark of 100,000 users, which is huge.

EGR Technology: What does Revolut’s London-based tech and development team look like?

DL: The entire company is growing immensely. When I joined six months ago we were roughly 300 employees, but we’ve just hit the 500 mark. We were just named a top employer in London, which is a great recognition for the quality of our people. We are not a bank investing in technology to become more tech friendly, we are a technology company that is doing finance. Everything is around technology, we are constantly hiring and right now we have 70 positions open.

They are demanding positions, but if people want to get their hands dirty and work among other insanely clever technical people, come and join us. We look for all kinds of tech people, front- and backend, obviously Android and iOS developers, and a lot of data scientists. We make sense out of all our data and we use it to produce more engagement cycles and feedback loops. We action those results and use them to make us better.

EGR Technology: What does Revolut offer to small businesses?

DL: The new platform we launched about a year ago is called Revolut Business. You can open a bank account in minutes and the entire application is online, so you don’t have to visit any bank branches. There is no waiting time. Of course, we do scrutinise all the applications and our compliance team is very strict and only onboards legitimate companies.

We exclude some industries, such as pornography, but we have 60,000 SMEs registered with us and we offer the same kind of technology and affordable services to them. We also offer something we call ‘the app store for banking’, which is Revolut Connect. It allows users to install third-party applications like Slack, which can enable you to get Slack notifications on each employee’s transactions.

Revolut’s mobile app has been downloaded over 2.5 million times

EGR Technology: What are the most common questions you receive from consumers?

DL: People ask whether their money is safe. As an FCA-regulated ‘emoney’ institution, their money is secure. It is placed in a segregated account at Lloyds. We cannot give loans to people, so the money is safe and guarded.

EGR Technology: How do you forge partnerships with other major consumer facing tech companies like Slack?

DL: Our team reaches out to apps and companies that produce amazing products. We take user feedback very seriously and we basically deliver what they ask for. We don’t make complex plans and three year roadmaps. Customers asked for an integration with [fellow challenger bank] Zero, so we carried out an integration with Zero. They asked for crypto, so we added a crypto wallet. It’s that simple.

When you link up with these tech companies, you have to remember they are also start-ups and they must like what we are doing. I think our brand also helps, as many tech companies know who we are already. I read a quote the other day that said: ‘Hustle until you don’t have to introduce yourself’. I think that’s where Revolut is at the moment.

EGR Technology: What’s next for Revolut?

DL: We are working to expand our presence and footprint by launching in the US – this is a biggie that we are focusing on. Our CEO was at Tech Front in San Francisco and talked about it there. It’s going to double our reach. The last investment round we received was $250m, which is going to be spent on this type of expansion and new hires. The target is to reach 800 employees by the end of the year. A lot of investment [is going into] hiring top talent and shipping top quality products.

The trading platform is also one of the game-changers that got lots of media attention in the summer. That will be launched very soon. We are also soon launching perks, which is a clever system to reward the daily users of our card. We want people to ditch cash entirely which is the reason why we are developing a perk meter that will be charged every time a customer makes a transaction. Random cash-back perks will be unlocked – a lot of cool brands are willing to offer something to our users.