In what started out as a travel exchange payment service, Revolut now encompasses all facets of financial and payment services you can think of.
Whilst there remains a focus on international payments, the UK fintech has diversified to offer its over 40 million global customers investing options, Open Banking, and even cryptocurrency, the latter enabled further with the launch of Revolut X.
Speaking on the neobank’s growth since 2015 and where Revolut stands currently today in 2024, David Tirado Blanco – VP of Profitability & Global Business – opened up day one of Money 20/20 Europe summarising a key theme of the company’s reflection on its customer needs; maturity.
Blanco describes the company maturing over the course of the last four years, which he believes can be summarised into several key stages.
The first stage was, of course, the impact of COVID-19 and the need to remain profitable in a time where the world stood still and contactless payments exploded into life to become the norm it is today.
With the contactless payment proliferation, Revolut’s e-wallet and digital card offerings no doubt benefited greatly. Blanco believes this enables the firm to scale up much more quickly in 2021 with the right internal investment and sustainability.
Product was also a key area of maturity where Blanco recognised growth for the company. He revealed that Revolut is now performing product launches in a more robust manner, being more precise before it enters a market, all whilst taking into account the end users needs.
“Maturity has been the common theme in the last few years since I have been here and also industrialising a little bit too,” remarked Blanco.
“But not from a Revolut perspective, our business has translated into customer impact and it is what we are here for. We see that over the last few years we have increased our domestic physical transactions by more than 50% from last year. We see the whole ecosystem working.”
But with scaling and growing at such a rate Revolut has done in the last several years, across a plethora of markets, consumer trust must be at the forefront to not only acquire new customers in new markets, but also to retain them.
Blanco reveals that this trust is built on working with a myriad of global regulators to remain compliant. This is essential for a customer base of more than 40 million users with more set to be added due to Revolut’s market entry into Mexico.
“Localisation, being a global player, is becoming increasingly important,” stated Blanco.
“One of the key things is to launch our brand in Europe, not physical branches, but digital branches that enables us to localise more of our products which we have launched in a few countries, which also enables us to have less friction and a better connection with our customers.”
Whilst Revolut’s meteoric growth over the better half of the decade has been an eye-opening success, the company is not resting on its laurels – not even remotely resting asserted Blanco.
He revealed: “We want to go deeper into primary banking, which we are working towards. We want to be the primary banking platform for all our users, and on that front we need to keep evolving our product, keep innovating in our services a 100 times better than what is in the market. So there is more to come.”
It is no secret that Revolut has been actively gunning to become an established bank. The fintech has yet to receive its UK banking licence, but has already obtained one in markets such as Lithuania, and more recently Mexico, amongst other countries.
With the UK one of the predominant financial hubs in the world, as well as being the company’s home, a UK banking licence would almost serve as something of an end goal being completed.
But don’t tell that to Blanco, because he reminded the Money 20/20 audience that despite being valued at upwards of $25bn, there is never any time for settling.
He concluded: “One of our values at Revolut that I really like is never settle. We are always looking at different areas, at different markets and how we can really disrupt this market by offering value to consumers.
“And that’s what keeps the company going.”
