case study revolut

• Español – América Latina
• Português – Brasil

Revolut: Building the first global financial super app with Google Cloud

About Revolut

Revolut is building the world’s first truly global financial superapp to help people get more from their money. In 2015, Revolut launched in the UK offering a multi-currency card, money transfers and currency exchange. Today, more than 20 million customers around the world use dozens of Revolut’s innovative banking products to make more than 250 million transactions a month. Across personal and business accounts, Revolut helps customers improve their financial health, gives them more control, and connects people seamlessly across the world.

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Revolut used compute engine to build an infrastructure that can scale at speed with rapid, automated deployments, while maintaining stability and security., google cloud results.

• Gives flexibility to automate deployments multiple times a day with Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud APIs
• Maintains resilience with snapshots for efficiency and minimal storage space
• Helps keep sensitive projects secure with easy segregation
• Allows Revolut to easily scale up vertically and horizontally within seconds
• Keeps Revolut's infrastructure compliant with multiple certifications with the shared responsibility model

Snapshots multi-terabyte databases in minutes

Revolut gives people and businesses more control over their finances, and offers data-driven insights and personalization that empowers its customers to make smarter decisions about how they spend, save or grow their money.

"As a fast-growing startup, pace of innovation is very important for us. With Google Cloud, we could build an environment where we can have continuous delivery, releasing as much as we can as quickly as possible."

Revolut launched in 2015, offering transfers and foreign exchange faster and cheaper than legacy banks. Seven years later, more than 20 million customers in more than 35 countries around the world use Revolut to manage their finances across an ever-growing suite of powerful and easy-to-use products.

The key to scaling up sustainably was to build an infrastructure that could automate updates and maintenance as much as possible, freeing up time for its developers and engineers to perfect the product. To do that, Revolut turned to Google Cloud .

"As a fast-growing startup, pace of innovation is very important for us," says Vlad Yatsenko, CTO and Founder at Revolut. "With Google Cloud, we could build an environment where we can have continuous delivery, releasing as much as we can as quickly as possible."

Automating deployment, kick-starting innovation

When Revolut began, it worked with another provider to create the initial cloud-based solution. However, as the company quickly gathered more momentum and customers, it became clear that a change was essential to support the rapid growth. Revolut wanted to automate as many of its processes as possible, especially in terms of deployment.

After testing a range of solutions from different providers, Revolut chose Google Cloud for its new infrastructure. The company already used Google Workspace for its productivity and email platform, so becoming familiar with the new environment was easy.

"The advantage of Google Cloud for us, is that everything is very simple and intuitive," says Vlad. "Our solution integrated with the infrastructure very easily. We didn't have to reinvent the wheel."

"Incremental snapshotting is my favorite Google Compute Engine feature. With the incremental feature, only the initial snapshot is big. The subsequent snapshots are much more efficient in terms of time and storage. Instead of backups lasting up to twenty hours, we now get a snapshot in around five minutes."

Revolut built its core infrastructure with Google Compute Engine virtual machines, which gave its engineers the perfect balance of ease of use and control over its security. With Google Cloud Identity and Access Management , Revolut could easily set up highly secure, separate instances for its main infrastructure and its application. "We want to protect our infrastructure perimeter so it's very important for us to be able to deploy the application separately," says Vlad.

The company also made extensive use of Google Cloud APIs in conjunction with a third-party automation tool to achieve fully automated "infrastructure as code" provisioning and management of the platform. This allowed Revolut's engineers to speed up their deployments and easily roll back if necessary.

Google Cloud Identity and Access Management enabled Revolut to assign permissions to Google Cloud resources simply and quickly "out of the box" without compromising security.

Keeping Revolut's multi-terabyte databases highly secure is essential. In the past, Revolut invested time and resources into full backups and restoration, which were slow and costly. As part of the migration to Google Cloud, Revolut completely redesigned its backup solution around incremental disk snapshots in Compute Engine. With snapshots, Revolut could continue to backup data more securely while minimizing the resource cost.

"Incremental snapshotting is my favorite Google Compute Engine feature," says Vlad. "With the incremental feature, only the initial snapshot is big. The subsequent snapshots are much more efficient in terms of time and storage. Instead of backups lasting up to twenty hours, we now get a snapshot in around five minutes."

Stability and speed for sustainable scalability

Revolut used Google Cloud to build an infrastructure that can scale at speed without sacrificing stability, automate deployment without compromising control, and maintain the security standards that are required of a financial services company. The company's developers and engineers have found creating instances much easier with Google Compute Engine, allowing them to build multiple instances for each of the applications that make up the Revolut platform. With the auto-scaling option on the applications' clusters, the developers don't have to worry anymore about adding more resources when there is a higher demand for their services.

"With Google Cloud, we can scale our environment on demand in minutes with zero downtime. That allows us to support our fast-paced growth and is key for innovation."

"Google Cloud is more efficient for us in terms of cost and it's more stable," says Vlad. "We can have each application running multiple instances, so everything is resilient and we don't have any downtime when we deploy new instances."

As well as providing stability, Google Cloud has helped Revolut to improve the speed of its operations. That means that while its customers can enjoy a continuously smooth service, the engineers can focus on building new products and improving current ones.

"With Google Cloud, we can scale our environment on demand in minutes with zero downtime," says Vlad. "That allows us to support our fast-paced growth and is key for innovation."

Google Cloud for a global vision

Revolut operates in more than 35 countries around the world and leverages Google's extensive global network of data centers to maintain an excellent standard of service for its users, wherever they are, whilst continuing supporting the expansion to additional markets, both functionally and geographically.

"We are building a financial platform for individuals and business across the world," says Vlad. "Google can offer us infrastructure that is seamless across regions. That's a huge benefit for us in helping us to achieve our global goals."

14 Surprising Reasons Revolut Bank Is So Insanely Popular

• Post author: Mike Parsons
• Post published: April 27, 2020
• Post category: Case Study

We spent weeks researching the success of  Revolut Bank  and we’ve got a complete analysis that will blow your mind.

Revolut is the leading  neobank  – a new category in the financial services industry. A Neobank is a traditional banks worst nightmare. They are internet-only or digital-only companies that avoid the cost and hassles of traditional bank branches.

Although only a recent development, neobanks like Revolut, which has blossomed with over 10 million users, enjoy lower infrastructure costs thanks to services like AWS and Azure. And the most significant barrier, a banking license, has become obtainable from regulators or via a partnership with incumbent banks.

Revolut and it’s $800M+ in venture capital is not the only Neobank shaking things up. You’ll find Neobanks sprouting everywhere:  Volt  in Australia,  n26  in Germany, and  Monzo  in the UK, to name a few.

Why do neobanks like Revolut matter?  Well, they offer all the core functions you’d expect from a traditional bank, like checking and savings accounts, but with a twist; they create significantly better user experiences. In the end, neobanks like Revolut develop products that users love. Oh, and they also have a better business model.

In writing this case study and masterclass, we discovered a real lack of end-to-end analysis of Revolut. So sit back and enjoy a deep dive into the world of Revolut and learn how they’ve achieved their success and how you might apply some of these learnings.

Here are our 14 Surprising Reasons Revolut Bank Is So Insanely Popular:

PART 1: THE PRODUCT

1. Revolut discovered significant value in just five dollars

Now the first place we find Revolut magic is in the ‘Aha Moment’. It’s when you transfer money via the Revolut app, say just five dollars, to one of your friends .

This transaction is the moment when you realise the value of Revolut. As a result, they design the experience to get you to this ‘Aha Moment’ as quickly as possible because once you’ve had this moment, you’re sold! A customer for life and you go and recruit new customers as part of the product experience. Once you’ve had this revolute aha moment, you’re sold! 

2. Revolut liberated our data through search

When we use a banking service, we create so much data. From user session to transaction data – servers and applications are swimming with data.

What Revolut understands is that data is only useful if it’s easily accessible for the user. And they do a great job with their ‘search’ function to make data obtainable within the actual interface and allow users to really dig down into the results .

They’ve included neat features including predictive search and real-time filtering of results as you type. Now, this sounds like a pretty straightforward feature but think about your bank apps and how hard it is to actually get to that kind of data .

My bank, for example, doesn’t let me export data to third parties AND doesn’t give me a budgeting app. SO they are effectively telling me ‘no you can’t do this with us, AND you can’t anyone else to help you!’. Thanks a lot .

3. Revolut mastered the cross-sell

Revolut’s dedication to simplicity of user experience means they have earned the user’s permission to be cross-sold .

Let’s have a look at their crypto offering looks right now. Despite the crypto product being a seperate offer to users; it has all the same design patterns of the other Revolut features. This makes movement between products inside the app feel effortless. You almost don’t notice doing it.

Compare the user journey with a traditional bank’s app. Imagine you wanted to buy stocks with your current bank, you’re most likely going to be forced to download one of their companion app that may have little or no resemblance to the app you’re familiar with! 

The bad news for traditional banks here is that this seperate app/separate product challenge might not even be by choice. Instead, it might be the result of an antiquated legacy system that encompass and inhibit so many traditional banks.

4. Revolut handcrafted their tech stack

Revolut is the champion of banking as a platform. We say ‘platform’ because they’re not just developing checking accounts, savings accounts, or wire transfers. Their ambitions are to do everything in finance, not only as a bank but right up into insurance and beyond. That’s why we refer to their approach as an ‘end to end’ application. One perfect example of this mentality is Sherlock. 

Sherlock is a card fraud detection system that Revolut built in only nine months. They built it on their own and it has very few dependencies. More impressive; it turns out that Sherlock, the fraud prediction system, picks the right fraud transactions about 30% of the time; remarkably higher than industry standard. I’m not going to get too much to Sherlock’s technical details but here’s a great article if you want to go down the rabbit hole

Here’s a quote from  Nikolay Storonsky  that encapsulates the end to end banking as a platform paradigm.

“The reality is what we’re trying to achieve is [to] build a 10x better financial services company that is 10x cheaper as well. The only way to do it is not building only one product, but building a platform with many products on top of it.”

Nikolay Storonsky

PART 2: THE PEOPLE

5. Revolut built a default work mode: fast

People and culture at Revolut are pretty impressive. There have been a few challenges here because they have a very ‘hard and fast’ culture. So perhaps a little reminiscent of the early days of Uber, these guys work at hyperspeed.

The intense culture of Revolut might not be for all. In fact, I don’t think it’s for many. Revolut was, and is, still a startup (or a scale up) with a lean mentality. That means work-life balance is out the door. I think you would be lucky to find 2% or 3% of people could genuinely survive and thrive in a working environment like that .

I n these circumstances you tend to find a lot of burn and churn. So it’s not surprising to find that several years ago Revolut did suffer several cultural setbacks caused by a high turnover of employees. There’s a very famous Wired article , which brought to life some of the challenges they faced due to this hard and fast culture .

6. Revolut created a culture with high ownership

The hard and fast results-orientated area that comes out of a key-value that they have, which they call ‘Getting It Done’.

It’s very similar to one of my favourite values, which is ownership; truly owning something, owning the outcomes, and not blaming others but you take full responsibility yourself. I want to show you all what this culture looks like.

Here’s a video from Revolut

GET IT DONE: Outstanding results delivered rapidly and consistently

By taking full ownership for outcomes, the staff at Revolut are able to move fast and achieve exceptional results.

7. Revolut adapted its culture when they made mistakes

In February 2019,  Wired  revealed severe issues with Revolut’s culture.

Revolut insiders reveal the human cost of a fintech unicorn’s wild rise: ‘Applicants asked to work for free, rudeness, and high staff turnover tarnish the fintech startup’s success story’

Now, I have to give credit to Revolut. Compare them to Uber, who had very similar problems with a hard and fast culture. Uber lost a CEO and has a business model under serious threat.

The difference with Uber is that Revolut has changed without the bloodbath of CEO departures and turmoil. You can see that out of the hundreds of reviews on Glassdoor.

Overall 3.8/5.0 Rating

• 71% Recommend to a Friend
• 77% Approve of CEO
• “Fun, kind, loving, fast paced, rewarding” (in 11 reviews)
• “You get exposure to many different things so you learn a lot” (in 7 reviews)
• “Work life balance: 12-15 working hrs per day plus weekends” (in 22 reviews)
• “Long hours (although not compulsory)” (in 12 reviews)

But I did want to pause here and just look at the pros and cons which are on the homepage for the revolute entry on Glassdoor. And it is bonkers because this is the whole cultural story in a snapshot.

What can we learn here? That when you go to a fast startup, you have to recruit the right people for it. And only a few will be the right fit.

PART 3: THE PROMOTION

8. Revolut small and autonomous growth teams

If Revolut struggled with people in culture, they’re not struggling with their promotion. Let’s start on the inside and look at some things they do that have powered this phenomenal growth .

Core to their growth marketing technique is their growth-teams structure. Similar to a skunkworks or scrum team, Revolut gets a few people together and sets them an audacious goal .

These growth teams are super decentralised and they’re cross-functional. So a representative example I found was:  a country manager would have in their team, a marketer, business developer, comms manager and community manager.

Let’s breakdown that team’s skill set;

• They have someone who’s on brand and story. That’s the marketer!
• The business developer who’s looking at what products are being offered, what’s going to grow.  
• They’ve got the comms manager, who’s all about the message . 
• And the community manager is getting people activated; which is how you get all those advocates sharing their story with others .

This team setup is a big part of their culture because actually they even do this outside of their growth initiatives. For example, their tech team also work in a similar way .

In Revolut, we have a company that uses the classic small, agile, lean teams to go fast with an audacious goal. And what’s fascinating is this is very similar to how Amazon works .

9. Revolut focus on a pre-early adopter user segment

The unique thing about Revolut’s marketing that generated over 10M users is that the effort did not rely on paid media. Instead, they created a snowball effect that would make most CMO’s jealous.

Revolut started with this ‘innovators’ segment. Now, this is not just early adopters; this is the “early early” adopter. Only two and a half per cent of their total customer base is this ‘innovators’ segment.

What is so compelling and instructive for us here is that they chose to start with these innovators because they knew that this segment would create a sort of a snowball effect that would ultimately help them acquire a more mainstream customer .

This approach is a classic use of a design thinking persona where you have a vibrant segment or archetype that you want to focus on as your prime customer. This approach is crucial when time, money and resources are so limited at the start of a new venture or product .

The key thing here is that in the end, the innovator is only going to make up to 3% of their total customer base. But here’s the insight. At the start, it was 100% about the innovator, because they knew if they got the innovator, they would start to get the early adopters and then, finally, the majority of mainstream users.

10. Revolut baked marketing into the product

The second Promotion lesson we can learn from Revolut is they put marketing in the product itself; this also mitigates the need for paid advertising .

Let’s go back to the ‘innovators’ segment. These users love to travel, go shopping and to enjoy entertainment. Now let’s look at how product and marketing intersect when you travel. You’re often making new currency transfers, that’s perfect because that’s the home ground of Revolut.

And it gets better for Revolut. Let’s look at shopping and entertainment. One of the biggest things Revolut users do is splitting bills in restaurants. Revolut makes this such a quick and easy process and it has a natural referral characteristic. This means each bill split is a chance for Revolut to acquire a new customer. They get the opportunity to enjoy a powerful viral effect; with advocacy and a lot of user recommendation .

And that’s in part why Revolut is so prominent today; they baked the marketing into the product. In fact you could say that it’s quite literally a core feature to go out and acquire new customers as part of its use .

11. Revolut created scarcity

Revolut has also deployed a classic marketing launch tactic: the waitlist.

So you get excited, just like I am at the moment to use my new Revolut account. And I jump on, and I have to wait. Now this brings back memories of Dropbox, and a ton of new companies that have used the waitlist to manage system usage. Practically, it means they don’t have too many concurrent users which prevents the whole stack falling over and makes the server load more manageable .

Perhaps more importantly, they’re creating scarcity. The interest and curiosity factor with this tactic is brilliant .

PART 4: THE PROFIT

12. Revolut removed the middleman from business

At the core of their business model is vertical integration. There’s no intermediary. And this is very important; not only the core service but also for all adjacent services. Their services are run, built, deployed, and managed internally .

This standalone approach means they are not dependent on any third parties for the provision of service. And this is a smart long term play because it makes life easy in the back office and on the bottom line.

To first set this up, what you have to realise is that Revolut is competing in a class of dinosaurs. Almost half of the banks in a Fraedom research report claimed that the single biggest obstacle to growth was their legacy systems on the inside .

So all your external dynamics are entirely dependent on your internal legacy systems. That was almost 50% of the banks that participated in this research. So what does this tell you?  Revolut has an unfair advantage because they have no legacy systems and because they built them all themselves. So if Revolut want to change or pivot their product, they can do so quickly and affordably .

And I’m going to take it a step further. Here’s founder and CEO, Nikolay Storonsky, talking about how the removal of the middleman helps their business model.

“Effectively when you run all the infrastructure in-house, you can make money out of this business, and the business becomes quite profitable,” Nikolay Storonsky

Revolut is enjoying an unfair type of exponential effect. As they cross-sell to customers, they’re making even more money than competitors, because they have so little legacy systems and third-party dependencies.

So there’s a bit of a compounding factor into this business, a bit of a network effect. And this is yet to be talked about, but I’m telling you, this long term business model has a substantial network effect, and that’s why it’s so compelling.

13. Revolut offered more than a checking account

What’s important to understand about their business is  that it isn’t just a savings account. They’ve built several revenue streams :

• Subscription Revenue
• Transaction Fee
• International Money Transfers
• Loans & Overdrafts
• Business Accounts

So they’ve got a ton of products. And as I said, they make more per transaction than others because they own their infrastructure.

14. Revolut created a product worth paying for

The closing thought that gets the business model turbo-charged is that if you want to, you can pay for the Revolut product. And if you pay for the product, you get a sexy, special looking metal card and you get a whole bunch of perks and get into some fancy lounges. It’s a status symbol for sure. When you head to Europe, you’ll see a ton of people have got these.

So it’s a pretty impressive business model that will mean Revolut will get more profitable over time. As an investment thesis right now, I think most VCs would have the chequebook open and ready to rock and roll when Revolut comes to visit. The early days of Revolut are so reminiscent of Jeff Bezos and Amazon and the investments they made in the early days. In the future, I’m sure we’ll be talking about the Revolut’ Flywheel effect’.

Let’s wrap up this deep dive into the success of Revolut. First of all, people, their area of improvement, they move fast and break stuff. But I think that they’re moving fast is critical because they’re building all their infrastructure into it from scratch. So they have had to go fast.

In terms of product, they can create all these ‘aha moments’ because they’re liberated from legacy constraints.

When I look at the long term profit, it’s this vertical stack that we just talked about that gives them multiple exponential sources of revenue .

Lastly, they focussed on the innovator at launch. They’ve been creating, engagement, curiosity, scarcity, in some cases, to their advantage. And they’ve been telling a story right from the moment that they asked you to sign up directly through to splitting bills throughout that whole customer journey. They’re telling a story worth sharing.

I hope you enjoyed the article on Revolut. If you want to go deeper to learn more about how they innovated, please check out  The Revolut Case Study .

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Revolut: The Fintech Revolution That's Changing the Game

• Financial inclusion done right.

One name has been making waves and transforming the way we think about banking and payments in the fast-expanding financial services market - Revolut. Revolut was founded with the goal of disrupting the traditional financial sector, and it has positioned itself as a pioneer in the fintech revolution, delivering new solutions that are changing the game for both consumers and businesses.

The Beginnings of a Fintech Disruptor

Revolut was founded in 2015 by Nikolay Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko with the goal of challenging traditional banking rules. The irritation of hidden costs, bad exchange rates, and a lack of transparency that hampered traditional banking drove the company's formation. This frustration served as the impetus for Revolut's mission to build a platform that values simplicity, transparency, and cost-efficiency .

A Diverse Financial Ecosystem

The rise of Revolut is defined by its diverse variety of financial products and services that serve to a wide range of individuals and enterprises. Revolut provided a borderless account from the start, allowing customers to hold and trade different currencies at interbank rates, eliminating the need for currency conversion fees. This decision was well received by frequent travelers and international enterprises, offering Revolut an appealing option to traditional banks.

Revolut's solutions expanded alongside the fintech landscape. The company moved into cryptocurrency trading, allowing users to buy, hold, and exchange cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin directly from the app. This action not only took advantage of the growing interest in digital assets, but it also democratized access to cryptocurrency markets.

Increasing Financial Literacy

Revolut has placed a heavy emphasis on financial education in addition to its product suite. The app's easy-to-use interface delivers real-time insights into spending habits, categorizing expenses and displaying trends. This tool encourages users to better manage their finances, save more efficiently, and make more educated financial decisions. Furthermore, Revolut's blog and educational resources provide practical insights into personal finance, investing strategies, and new financial trends, equipping users with the knowledge to manage the financial world's intricacies.

Business Finance is Being Revolutionized

Revolut's influence extends beyond individuals; it has also made great gains in altering commercial finance. With the launch of Revolut for Business, a package of tools designed to streamline financial processes for enterprises of all kinds was introduced. Multi-currency accounts, corporate cards, cost management features, and connections with common accounting software are among the tools available. Revolut has enabled businesses to grow their operations abroad without incurring excessive fees by simplifying cross-border transactions and delivering cheap exchange rates.

Navigating Regulatory Obstacles

While Revolut's story has been one of quick expansion and innovation, it has not been without difficulties. The financial sector's regulatory scrutiny has forced the corporation to step up its compliance efforts. Revolut worked with regulatory authorities to get the appropriate licenses and permits as it expanded its services across other areas. This not only confirmed its legitimacy, but also demonstrated its dedication to upholding the greatest levels of security and data protection.

Bridging Financial Gaps in South America

In an era marked by unprecedented technological advancements, financial inclusion remains a pressing global challenge. Amidst this backdrop, Revolut has emerged as a beacon of hope for the unbanked and underserved populations around the world. Its strategic focus on Southern America not only demonstrates a commitment to addressing financial inequality but also signals a long-term payoff in reshaping the region's financial landscape .

With ‘super-app’ aspirations, the British fintech launches in Brazil with multi-currency and crypto offerings that make it stand out from its competitors #WebSummitRio https://t.co/q7TnJmKB9G — The Brazilian Report (@BrazilianReport) May 3, 2023

Revolut's revolutionary approach to banking transcends geographical boundaries, aiming to provide financial services to individuals who have traditionally been excluded from the formal banking sector. Revolut's user-friendly mobile app and digital platform enable the unbanked to access essential financial tools, from sending and receiving money to managing payments and savings—all without the need for a traditional bank account.

Beyond the unbanked, many individuals in Latin America remain underserved by traditional financial institutions due to factors such as limited credit history or geographical constraints. Revolut's innovative approach, which leverages digital technology and streamlined processes, bridges these gaps by providing a comprehensive suite of financial services to a broader range of people. By offering features like affordable cross-border transfers, currency exchange, and budgeting tools, Revolut helps users navigate financial challenges with ease.

Revolut's strategic foray into Southern America holds the promise of significant long-term gains. The region, characterized by a large population and diverse economies, offers ample opportunities for innovation and growth in the fintech sector. The convenience of digital transactions resonates with the tech-savvy population, especially the younger demographic, providing Revolut a solid foundation to expand its user base.

Moreover, by addressing the financial needs of the unbanked and underserved, Revolut can tap into a previously untapped market, potentially yielding sustainable growth over time.

Revolut: The Fintech of the Future

Looking ahead, Revolut's path will be one of reinvention and expansion. The company's success has attracted a sizable user base, with over 15 million customers worldwide. Revolut is positioned to play an even more prominent role in influencing the future of financial services as it expands its offers and refines its services.

Revolut is well-positioned to make further developments in the fintech environment, with a sharp focus on innovation, customer-centricity, and financial empowerment. Revolut's entire ecosystem offers a look into the possibility of a seamless, all-in-one financial platform as traditional borders between banking, payments, and investing continue to blur.

Finally, Revolut exemplifies the capacity of fintech to question norms, break obstacles, and usher in a new era of financial inclusion. Revolut has changed how people interact with money by leveraging technology, openness, and a dedication to education. Revolut stays at the forefront of the fintech revolution, a driving force in the ongoing change of how we manage, spend, and invest our money.

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Revolut Company Case Study: A Fintech Success Story

Revolut Ltd is a fintech company in London, UK and one of the largest startups in Europe, offering a range of banking and payment services through a mobile app and currency cards. Their services include currency exchange, Mobile Banking, Card Payments, Money Remittance, Foreign Exchange, insurance, and more. They favour individuals, freelancers, and small and medium enterprises, and have a global presence across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.

Also Read About: Zerodha Founders

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Brief overview.

Founded – 2015 Founders – Nikolay Storonsky, Vlad Yatsenko Location – London, England, UK Former name – Revolut Operating Status – Active Operating In – Fintech Startup Legal Name – Revolut Ltd. Total Revenue – €375 Million (Wikipedia)

About Revolut Company

Revolut is available in 47 countries, including every country in the EU and EEA. The main origin of the company is in London United Kingdom. Revolut made its debut in India in April 2021, after building on previous successful launches in Singapore and Australia in 2019, as well as in the US and Japan in 2020. Revolut offers financial services designed to simplify and improve the way people manage their money like Revolut Mobile Banking, Card Payments, Money Remittance and Foreign Exchange.

Revolut Mission

Revolut company’s primary mission is to continuously simplify, enhance, and add value to all aspects of financial management, making them significantly more convenient and beneficial for everyone, every single day. To accomplish this mission, Revolut has a workforce that reflects the rich diversity of our customer base.

Revolut Success Story

• The journey of Revolut was started in 2015 by Nikolay Storonsky (CEO and Founder) and Vlad Yatsenko (CTO – Co-Founder) operating in London a fintech incubator.
• After that In 2017 Revolut launched on different platforms like Business, and Revolut Premium, and entered the cryptocurrency market, starting with Crypto Trading in EEA.
• In 2018, Revolut secured $250 million , achieving a post-funding valuation of $1.7 billion, making it unicorn. By December 2018, it obtained a Challenger bank license from the European Central Bank and an Electronic Money Institution license from the Bank of Lithuania for deposits and credits for customers.
• In 2019, Revolut introduced commission-free stock trading with the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq and made key hires with traditional banking experience. They made their first expansion into Australia and Singapore. In October 2019, a global partnership with Visa expanded its reach to 3500 new workforce in 24 markets.
• By February 2020, a funding round valued Revolut at £4.2 billion, making it the UK’s most valuable fintech startup . They Launched their app in the USA and Japan and read to 14.5 M users. In March, Revolut launched in the United States, followed by a debut in Japan in August. By the end of the year, the company gained profitability.
• In January 2021, Revolut applied for a UK banking license and later sought a bank charter in the US. In July, Revolut raised $800 M, resulting in a $33 bn valuation, with investments from SoftBank Group and Tiger Global Management. Revolut Company brought about £636 million in revenue in 2021 which was a huge profit for the organization.
• In January 2022, Revolut launched in 10 European countries as a bank. In March Revolut’s public stance against the Russia-Ukraine war, was accompanied by a substantial donation to the Red Cross Ukraine appeal. At that time, it had 18 million global customers and 150 million monthly transactions. In September Revolut UK, witnessed a cyberattack exposing the data of 50,000 customers, prompting regulatory action.
• In January 2023, Revolut shifted its Irish customers to an Irish branch, aiming to compete with traditional banks. Revolut Bank started offering cryptocurrencies in the UK and European Economic Area in 2023. In May the Bank of England poised to reject Revolut’s UK banking license application. By July, Revolut expanded to 30 million customers across 37 countries.
• Revolut app launches in New Zealand with over 26k Kiwis to access free foreign currency exchange ad payments.

Revenue And Profit

In 2021, Revolut experienced substantial financial growth, with revenue surging from £220 million in 2020 to £636 million. The company also achieved a remarkable turnaround in its net income, reporting £26 million in profit compared to a £223 million loss in the same year. Gross margin saw significant improvement, increasing from 33% to 70%. Revenue sources diversified, with cards and interchange contributing 23% £149 million, subscriptions 17% £107 million, and foreign exchange and wealth services representing the majority at 55% £349 million. Shortly after securing around $45.5 million in initial investments from its UK-based parent company, Revolut India announced an upcoming acquisition.

Revolut Challenges

Revolut, amid rapid growth, faced the dual challenge of enhancing user onboarding while combating fraud. The fintech company was confronted with several controversies, including delayed financial filings, EU regulatory breaches, and an aggressive workplace culture. In 2020, despite a 34% revenue increase to £222 million, Revolut posted a £208 million loss. Problems extended to Lithuania, where it holds its EU banking license, with parliamentary investigations and penalties for various issues. A flaw in its US payment system led to a $20 million loss to organized criminal groups. Despite revenue, Revolut reported a record £167 million net loss in 2021. That is affecting the customers in the United States.

Closing Thoughts

Revolut’s journey in the world of fintech touches remarkable growth and notable challenges. From its humble beginnings in London to becoming a global powerhouse in financial services, the company’s mission to simplify and enhance financial management remains at its core. Despite facing regulatory issues, workplace controversies, and financial challenges, Revolut’s commitment to innovation and customer-centric solutions continues to be the future of banking. With millions of users worldwide and a diverse range of services, Revolut UK stands as a transformative potential of fintech, always managing money more convenient and beneficial for everyone.

REFERENCES:

“ Revolut , Revolut reports first full year of profit “ “ Revolut – Story , Revolut: can the chancellor’s fintech favourite fix its image problem? “ “ Revolut onboards 12% more users “

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08 May The Revolut Innovation Series [Part 1] 4 reasons why Revolut is such a great product

Revolut is the most successful neobank , shifting the paradigm in the financial industry and making it harder and harder for traditional banks to catch up. By offering all the core functions you’d expect from traditional banks with a twist, they create significantly better user experiences that customers love.

Though it’s only been on the market for nearly 5 years, Revolut has rocketed – reaching more than 10 million users and over $800 million in venture capital. And Revolut is not the only neobank shaking things up. Monzo in the UK, n26 in Germany, and Volt in Australia are also walking the same path (at a different speed, though).

How did Revolut grow from an e-money services provider into a billion-dollar digital-only bank? To fully understand their success, we need to look at how they built their pillars of innovation – product, people, promotion, and profit – and what makes them so strong.

Our 4-part series uncovers the Revolut innovation, starting with the product and including a video walk-through the analysis . Check in the following weeks for the upcoming parts, and you will get a full picture of what makes Revolut so insanely popular. Or discover the full Revolut case study on  BottomUp Skills  – our e-learning platform for busy innovators, who want to sharpen their skills  in innovation, design thinking, and technology.

Product innovation

Innovation happens when products relieve big customer pains through experiences that create measurable gains for all their users. In this survival kit for business innovation , QUALITANCE CEO Mike Parsons, delivers a straightforward definition of an innovative product or service, identifying it as something that:

• is 10x times better than what is on offer today;
• tackles huge problems;
• offers a radical solution;
• relies on breakthrough, emerging technology.

Here’s how Revolut checks all the right boxes.

#1 Huge value in just five dollars

Revolut built its magic through a lot of AHA moments. One of the first ones you get is when you transfer money, even if it’s just 5 dollars, to a friend. This simple transaction is when you realize the value of Revolut.

From the very beginning, Revolut understood they needed to keep building as many experiences as possible to get you into that AHA moment. Because when you get that feeling, you naturally share it with your friends and family. Before you know it, you start campaigning for Revolut – recruiting new users among close people, teammates and collaborators, because you want them to live the same product experience.

#2 Liberated data through search

Whenever we use a banking service, we generate massive data. And Revolut knows that data is only useful if users can find it easily. That’s why they built a ‘search’ function to makes data available within the actual interface, allowing users to really dig down into their results.

Not many bank apps out there let you use common sense features such as predictive search and real-time filtering of results while typing. Let alone export data to 3-rd parties or access an embedded budgeting feature – which Revolut makes possible in a blink.

#3 Mastering the cross-sell

By simplifying the user experience, Revolut has rightfully earned the user’s permission to be cross-sold.

Even though the crypto product is a separate offer to users, it follows all the design patterns of the other Revolut features. Because of this, products move inside the app so effortlessly, it’s barely noticeable to users.

How far away are traditional banks from that? If you want to buy stocks with your current bank, you’re most likely forced to download one of their companion apps that in most cases look quite different than the app you’re familiar with.

In the defense of traditional banks, in most cases, the app/separate product challenge is not necessarily a question of choice – it’s rather the result of antiquated legacy systems that inhibit their digital transformation.

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#4 Handcrafting the tech stack

“The reality is what we’re trying to achieve is [to] build a 10x better financial services company that is 10x cheaper as well. The only way to do it is not building only one product, but building a platform with many products on top of it.”    – Nikolay Storonsky, CEO and Founder of Revolut

For quite some time now, Revolut has been doing more than developing checking accounts, savings accounts, or wire transfers. They want to cover everything in finance – not just the core bank stuff, but right up into insurance and beyond.

Sherlock is an example of their ‘end to end’ approach. This ML-based card fraud detection system, which was built in just nine months, has very few dependencies. What’s more, its fraud prediction engine uses Machine Learning algorithms to identify fraud transactions, and 30% of the time its predictions prove to be right -remarkably higher than the industry standard. More info on the amazing stuff Sherlock does in this comprehensive article .

Don’t forget to check in for the second part of our series, where we cover the Revolut innovation at the level of people and culture.

About BottomUp Skills

BottomUp Skills platform is the e-learning platform created and supported by the QUALITANCE global thought-leadership team for innovators, makers, and creatives who want to sharpen their skills in innovation, design thinking, and technology. Usually, such courses are exclusive to our clients such as Ford Motor Company, News Corp Australia, Breville, and many others around the world. Now, we have opened the paid subscription courses and made them available to everyone for life.

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Feb 27, 2023

Revolut: From Start-Up to Super App

• Digital Strategy
• Customer Experience (CX)

Written by Clodagh O’Brien

Revolut is a company that’s taken the financial world by storm. Its self-titled ‘global financial super app’ became the UK’s most valuable start-up after a £24 billion/$33 billion valuation making it more valuable than some European banks. 

With over 15 million users and growing, Revolut has set itself apart in the traditional industry as a digital-only banking app (or neobank ) that focuses on a core product and is easy to use with no hidden charges. In other words, it offers a simple and effective alternative to a traditional bank. 

What’s particularly interesting about Revolut is its marketing approach. With a focus on the user, the brand aims to turn customers into advocates. This helps Revolut tap into one of the oldest and most reliable forms of promotion - word-of-mouth advertising. 

So how did this start-up go from zero to hero in just eight years? Let’s look at their digital marketing strategy and tactics that have made it one of the biggest disruptors in the finance industry . 

As Benjamin Belais , Head of France and Switzerland at Revolut says: “Banking is not sexy, nobody wants to talk about it – let’s make banking great again.”

This content is available to Power Members only.

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Clodagh O'Brien is a content creator and strategist. Over the last 12 years, she has created and managed content for many SMEs and global brands. She's passionate about digital marketing and the impact of technology on culture and society. You can find her on  Twitter  or  LinkedIn .  

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Impact and Revolut Case Study

October 16, 2020 | 5 min read

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Fintech innovator Revolut enables consumers to manage their finances from a single app

As a technology-led firm, Revolut knew automation would be the answer to managing and growing those ambassador partnerships so they joined forces with Impact to bring this disruptor mindset to the affiliate finance world.

With the key marketing goal of achieving 100% growth in customer acquisition, Impact was tasked with several objectives to work towards this ambitious target. The new referral partnership programme had to remove manual tasks from their current partner relationships in order to free up more time to work with additional partners. Revolut wanted to evolve customers into advocates and subsequently into partners who would then be measured on their customer acquisition. Ultimately, Revolut’s main goal was to engage 1,000 active partners and double the size of the programme by the end of 2019.

With an ambitious customer acquisition goal to meet, Impact was tasked with developing an innovative ambassador programme to deliver the key objectives. Revolut leveraged Impact’s technology globally and this partnership allowed them to do less traditional affiliate focused campaigns and be more creative in how they onboard and nurture their partners. Revolut tapped into their entire customer base to identify brand ambassadors and affiliates then signed them up to the Impact platform. By the end of one week, there were almost 3,000 applications, 42% of which were eventually accepted onto the programme.

Impact’s leading technology reduced Revolut’s manual processes by automating invoices of fixed partner costs, partner onboarding and management. This led to a significant reduction in work hours by 160 hours as a result of migrating partner payments from the manual process to Impact. This improved billing solution significantly reduced Revolut’s Finance team workload and created a more efficient payment process.

In addition to moving from manual partner payment to Impact’s automated process, Revolut implemented click, lead, and customer acquisition trackers. This allowed the company to create and execute customised contracts with its different partners. By creating click, lead and customer acquisition trackers, Revolut and Impact have been able to create payment models for partners which are bespoke to that arrangement. The payouts are automated by the Impact platform, allowing for highly customised partnerships at scale.

A seamless payment process was integral to the success of the programme so Revolut utilised the Dynamic Payouts feature from Impact enabling them to adjust payout rates to partners. This innovative feature solved the problem of split commissions; Revolut can now adjust payouts to partner(s) who assisted in the customer conversion. This gives Revolut a practical way to reward early-funnel contributors without completely taking away credit from the partner who won the last click.

As a disruptive challenger brand, Revolut have always used creative tactics to acquire new customers. By partnering with Impact, they wanted to bring innovation to the world of finance affiliates.

Revolut began working as a publisher and they believed in the value of partnerships so strongly, that they built a business development team tasked with finding other advertisers to work with them directly and pay Revolut for that exposure. Revolut’s publisher proposition works via the Perks sections of the Revolut app. When a user achieves perks through highly engaged behaviour they can earn cashback on certain brands including Treatwell, Omio and Booking.com.

An example of a highly successful element of the campaign is when Revolut sent an email newsletter to their entire customer base promoting their Affiliate and Pioneers influencer programmes on Radius by Impact. By the end of the calendar week, they had 1154 Pioneer applications and 1857 affiliate applications, 42% of which were accepted onto the programme. Given the steps required in the signup flow, the response rate was truly impressive. By December 2019, Revolut had scaled their partner programme from less than 100 partners to more than 6,000.

Since partnering with Impact, Revolut have increased their active partners to 6,000 across their accounts, a six-fold overachievement of the 1,000 partner target. This puts them firmly as the largest finance partner programme in the UK. Revolut now has better visibility into their full conversion path and since working with Impact, Revolut has seen a massive 700% increase in customers acquired from the partner programme in the time period of April-Dec 2019 compared to April-Dec 2018. The new opportunities, created through automation and improved technology, allowed Revolut to achieve customer acquisition growth that was 7 times their original target.

By inviting customers to become official brand advocates, Revolut received a phenomenal response with more than 1,200 customers successfully gaining approval to join the referral partnership programme.

Ultimately, Impact helped Revolut scale their partner programme and remove manual tasks from their partner relationships. This was achieved by segmenting partner applications by country to accelerate affiliate approval rates, providing partner documentation for smoother onboarding and by paying non-affiliate partnerships at scale.

With automation as the focal point of the referral partnership programme, Impact was able to deliver a growth rate of 700% and grow Revolut’s programme to more than 6,000 active partners.

Through a series of automations, analyses and creative approaches, Impact and Revolut were able to shake up the definition of what it means to be an affiliate in the financial vertical. Impact’s implementation of the referral partnership programme transformed Revolut’s customer base into active advocates and ultimately turned the challenger brand into a multimillion-making affiliate, making their partner programme one of the biggest in the UK. By the end of 2019, the Revolut partner programme grew to have more than 6,000 active partners, saved over 140 hours in automation and delivered a growth rate of 700%.

Your users refer other businesses, and both sides get rewarded when the referred business upgrades to a paid plan. (With conversion tracking)

Create a referral waiting list before you launch to get early adopters and market validation.

The more successful referrals your users make, the better rewards they unlock. (With conversion tracking)

People sign up and refer friends to win a free ticket. If they don't win, they get early access to the pre-sale.

People join the waiting list, refer their friends to climb the queue and get early access to the tickets or the event.

A referral giveaway with a social element—people see a leaderboard of who's winning the giveaway.

Create an in-email referral program to reward your newsletter readers for inviting more subscribers.

Your existing audience refers their friends to increase their chances of winning a prize.

Find early community members with a referral waitlist where people refer friends to climb the queue and get exclusive access.

People get early access to your product when they reach the top of the waiting list by referring friends.

Your users referer their friends, and both sides get rewarded when the friend makes a purchase.

Set milestones with a tiered referral system, offering better prizes as they reach each milestone.

Create an ongoing referral program using our Shopify App to reward your customers for referring friends.

New and existing customers refer friends to increase their chances of winning a prize.

Create a referral waiting list for your upcoming store to collect email addresses.

viral loops case studies

How revolut grew 150x with referral marketing—a case study..

Read an in-depth case study of Revolut’s referral programs and strategy that help them grow exponentially.

Understand the tactics behind the 5 kinds of referral campaigns they use to: - Grow their customer base via their existing high-quality customers. - Increase the adoption rate of new features. - Launch in new markets.

Table of contents

Revolut company review

Marketing strategy

Referral marketing & word-of-mouth

Goal: Acquire similar customers

Goal: Promote a new feature

Goal: Launch in a new market

1. Revolut company overview

Revolut is one of the first Fintech companies that disrupted the banking industry, and it may be the largest in the market.

It started as a solution to the hefty fees one must pay when traveling and transferring money internationally. However, their current product offerings include many more solutions such as commission-free trading, cryptocurrency investing, and budgeting tools.

As of 2019, they offer bank-only products like credit after getting an official bank license in the European Central Bank. In terms of growth and marketing, they are a prime example of hyper-growth with minimal to no paid advertising based around Word-of-Mouth and referral marketing—from which we can learn a lot.

Founding story

The founder Nikolay Storonsky, came with the idea while working as a financial trader for Lehman Brothers. His job embraced the expat lifestyle, which required him to travel a lot and live in many different countries—where he got familiar with spending and transferring money abroad.

During his travels, he grew frustrated with the fees he had to pay for every transaction. His financial knowledge made him realize that he was being overcharged, which he tried to solve by opening multiple accounts on large bank groups like HSBC—it didn’t work.

In 2015 he decided to build a product to travel without spending a fortune on banking fees—the outcome was Revolut. They managed to create the first prototype with a small team within two months, later describing it as “childish and buggy”.

However, as the company grew, they started identifying more problems on the banking system that gave them ideas for the features they offer today. According to Nikolay, the goal was to “offer a complete set of products that are 10x better and 10x cheaper than what’s offered by (regular) banks”.

After that, the ambition is to become a global bank that allows anyone to open a bank account within 1 minute.

2. Marketing strategy

Their overall marketing strategy is centred around their product, with the aim to provide something so good that customers will do the marketing for them—aka word-of-mouth.

"If you build a great product that actually solves real painful problems customers will come along, our job is to make it easier for them to recommend it to their friends, family and colleagues”

~ Revolut’s ex Head of Growth, Val Scholz

As a strategy, it proved to be beyond effective as most of their growth until 2018 was done with no paid advertising. To achieve such growth through word of mouth, Revolut's plan uses two tactics:

• Product with built-in virality
• Referral marketing campaigns

The focus of this case study is the latter—how Revolut grows through referral marketing. But since virality works as a catalyst of referral marketing, let’s see some examples of how their product embraces this.

2.1. Creating a viral loop

Being a banking solution, Revolut’s customers interact with the company on an online and offline basis. One might use their digital card to buy a guitar online, their trading platform to hold crypto, but they will also use their physical card to buy coffee at their local cafe. With that,

Revolut's marketing focuses on creating an offline/online viral loop, where both physical and digital aspects of the product bring new users.


A better product with more users (network effects)

The first example of Revolut’s product virality is that the user experience improves if their friends are also on the platform. 


Two features that illustrate that are the Bill-Splitting and Group expenses. Imagine a couple of friends, most of whom using Revolut, eating together at a table. In the end, the bill arrives, and it’s time for everyone to pay their share.

The Revolut users of the table can quickly settle their expenses by sending payment requests to each other within the platform. The rest, however, who have to settle the bill in an old-school way, will see the convenience of using Revolut, and they’ll want to take part too.

That’s where the referral program comes into play. With the motivation to join the platform, the non-users only need one little push to make the leap and sign up.

The existing users then have the incentive to get them to sign up as soon as possible since they’ll get a monetary reward in return.

Shareable offline experiences

‍ The physical side of Revolut’s product is their cards. They realize the importance of design in creating sharable experiences, and that reflects in their product.

The first interaction with the card is when the user receives one in the mail. The packaging of the card is something unique and playful—it has an interesting sliding mechanism that’s like no other packaging out there—the card slides out the left as you pull to the right.

Besides that, it also has a very slick design that is nothing like that of a traditional bank. It’s an interesting item that makes one much more likely to share it with a friend and play around with it.

3. Referral marketing & word-of-mouth

In doing this research, it appeared that Revolut has a very controlled and targeted referral marketing strategy where different campaigns are targeted at different customers, different times, and in different countries. Thus, the cases discussed below may differ from where you’re reading this.

Revolut has word of mouth as the center focus of their marketing—as their ex-Head of Growth said, “...customers will come along, our job is to make it easier for them to recommend it to their friends…”.

65-70% of Revolut’s traffic is through word of mouth

Let’s see how they accomplish that.
Over the years, the company has used referral programs in many different ways to accomplish various different goals, so it’s more than a single referral campaign that we’ll discuss.

The overarching objective of every referral campaign is, of course, user acquisition. To better understand the strategy, we can categorize Revolut’s referral programs by these (sub) goals: Feature unlock, launch in a new market, acquire similar customers.

4. Goal: Acquire similar customers

Acquiring more of your best customers is the most straightforward objective behind a referral marketing campaign—incentivize your best customers to invite their friends, who will most likely be similar customers to your best ones.

4.1. Campaign A: Invite friends and get 60€

How it works.

Revolut offers a referral link to their customers, which they can share with their friends, family & colleagues.

If the referred person, also called invitee, signs up through that link and performs certain actions, it is registered as a successful referral. In this case, the person who invited the new customer gets their reward.

Revolut offers 60€ in a 1-sided referral campaign, where the reward is only given to the inviter. The invitees, those who sign up through the referral links, receive nothing tangible for joining.

Requirements for the referrer:

Their friends have to successfully sign up through the referral link to receive 60€ per referral.

Requirements for the invitee:

Revolut has a fairly tedious task list to be done by the invitee before the referral is considered successful:

• Sign up to Revolut using the unique referral link.
• Verify their identity (KYC checks).
• Add money to their account.
• Order a physical Revolut card (they have to pay for delivery fees).
• Make 3 separate purchases of at least 5€ with the digital or physical cards.


Strategic twists

We identified three creative ways or growth hacks that Revolut uses to further boost the performance of this referral campaign.

• Time pressure : Users have a time limit in which they can invite friends and get rewards. This FOMO-creating hack should increase their successful referral rate by putting pressure on users to convince their friends to sign up and perform the required tasks quickly.
• Controlled eligibility : Ιn the T&C of their referral program, it is mentioned that such promotions are only available for selected users at a time. Indeed, during some of these referral campaigns, only paying users were given the option to get rewards for inviting friends.
• Potential earnings : If the user proceeds on the screen where they can invite their contacts, they will see an estimate of how much they can earn if they invite the selected contacts. Such a tactic, though a tiny detail, can intrigue and further motivate users to invite more people to Revolut, thus fuelling the growth loop.

The invitee page

After clicking the referral link, the invitee is taken to a simple page where they can sign up. Revolut effectively informs the invitee about the core value they’ll get by signing up, and it establishes trust through social proof. All without cluttering theValue proposition page with tons of information on all their features.

We can break down the page into four attributes that fuel conversions:

• Liking ‍ The main headline, “You were invited to Revolut” reminds people that their friend trusts Revolut and invited them to join. Also, the phrasing gives a feeling of exclusivity like that of being invited to a private club.
• Social proof ‍ Without scrolling, the invitee is reminded through clever copy, above the fold that more than 15 million people use Revolut.
• Value Right below the main headline, Revolut promotes its main value proposition with subtle gray typography. Then with a single scroll, one can see the four main reasons people join Revolut for.
• Simple CTA The only thing needed is the invitee’s phone number, thus offering an effortless signup process. No name, no email.

4.2. Campaign B: Give a card

Around 2019 Revolut was running the referral program with a unique reward system that proved to work wonders for their daily user acquisition numbers:

2-3X daily user acquisition numbers

How it worked

Similar to the campaign discussed above, Revolut offered a referral link to their customers so they could share it with their friends, family & colleagues. If the invitee signed up through that link and performed certain actions, a successful referral is registered. The twist in this campaign is that the invitee receives the reward while the inviter gets nothing tangible.

Revolut offered a physical card in a 1-sided referral campaign, where the reward is given only to the invitee—the inviters get nothing tangible in return.

The requirements

This campaign seemed to be more lenient without requiring the invitee to perform any purchasing actions—all they had to do was follow the conventional onboarding:

• Sign up through the link
• Verify their identity
• Add funds to their account
• Order the free card

Strategic twist

Such a rewarding schema where the referrer offers something instead of receiving is fairly uncommon. It shows the importance of having a product so valuable that a brand’s ambassadors expect nothing for their work. 


Revolut presents the campaign with clever copy that makes users feel positive about themselves—“Feeling generous?” frames the act of referring a friend as something a generous person would do, a trait most people want to be associated with.

5. Goal: Promote a new feature

Another strategic use for referral marketing is when releasing a new feature. Not only do you acquire more users, the overarching goal of a referral campaign, but also you increase the adoption of that feature. As a tactic, it allows a firm to get insights on how much demand exists (and from whom) for a given feature before further investments are made.

5.1. Campaign C: Get a free premium card

Back in 2018, Revolut released their premium subscription “Revolut Metal”. It offered a high-quality metal bank card along with many premium features, like higher cash-back, airport lounge access, and more. It was quite a big deal at the time, as more challenger banks, like N26, had started offering premium models packaged in metal cards.

To boost adoption, Revolut deployed a referral campaign to upsell existing users into the premium tier by offering them a free metal card if they invited friends. asdfas

Once again, Revolut offered a referral link to users so they could share it with their friends. If that friend signed up through the link and performed the required actions, the referrer would get the reward—a free metal card subscription.

Revolut offered a 1-sided referral campaign, rewarding a free 12-month Metal subscription along with a free metal card (€135 in value) to the referrer. The invitee would get nothing tangible for signing up.


For the referrer:

They had to successfully refer 5 friends to get the 12-month free premium reward.

For the inviter:

To qualify as a successful, the invitee had to follow the regular onboarding process—it was not necessary to perform any purchasing actions:

• Order a physical card
• Aggressive-ish promotion: The referral program was promoted on the app’s home screen with a large banner, informing users that they can get a free metal card by inviting friends. Usually, Revolut houses its referral program inside the user's account page. It seems they wanted to get timely feedback and data on the demand for their new feature.
• Gamification: An interesting touch of this campaign is that Revolut added a space invaders game inside their referral dashboard, which users had to complete before receiving the reward. Such a tactic, alien to banking products, was aligned with Revolut’s playful branding at the time and made the product itself more approachable by the younger generation that is their target customer.

5.2 Campaign D: Cryptocurrency exchange feature unlock

For Revolut, 2018 was an incredibly productive year since they also launched their cryptocurrency exchange. With it, users can trade crypto easily without or at very low fees right from inside their banking app—a much-anticipated feature and timed perfectly with 2018’s hype on cryptocurrencies.

Similar to the Metal subscription release, Revolut’s strategy wasn’t to make the feature available to as many users as possible right away. Instead, they opted for a controlled release to premium users—regular users could get access by upgrading or by inviting friends.

In classic Revolut fashion, users got a unique referral link that they could share with their friends and family. If the invitees signed up through that link and performed the required actions, thus completing a successful referral, the referrer got access to the cryptocurrency exchange.

This campaign was a 1-sided referral program, where the inviter would get access to the cryptocurrency exchange feature. The invitee would get nothing tangible for signing up.

Requirements

For the referrer: To get access to the cryptocurrency exchange, one had to successfully refer 3 friends successfully.

For the invitee: In the referral dashboard, there was no list of tasks needed for an invite to count as a successful referral—only the requirement to sign up through the unique link. However, drawing from Revolut’s referral program T&C we suspect that some of the following were also required:


• Verify your identity
• Order a card
• Add funds to your account

An incentive to upgrade subscription: If you were a premium customer, you could get direct access to the new product, but if you were a standard user, you had to upgrade to premium or invite three friends to get it. This way, Revolut might have been able to upsell many customers to their premium offering since the act of upgrading requires less effort and time than referring friends, yet it’s not as accessible.

6. Goal: Launch in a new market

When launching in new markets, an extremely effective strategy used in the Fintech sector is that of a prelaunch campaign—a.k.a. a waitlist. The goal is to create hype and anticipation around the upcoming product while acquiring useful customer data. Let’s see how Revolut, founded in the UK, did it when it launched for the US market.

6.1. Campaign E: Prelaunch waitlist in the U.S.A

In March of 2020, Revolut launched its banking app in the United States of America. However, that was not their first interaction with the new market. In the months coming up to the launch, Revolut created a prelaunch waitlist campaign that grew to 30,000-40,000 participants in the first month. This allowed Revolut to run a beta program prior to launch and create a community ready to use their product even before it was ready.

The goal was to create a soft launch where Revolut would slowly onboard users from the waitlist into the beta version of the American app.


The main touchpoint of this campaign was the website, through which one could join the waitlist. After providing their phone number and email (the first steps of Revolut’s signup flow), they would be part of the waitlist. From there, they could see their position in the queue, which they could increase by inviting friends to the waitlist using the unique referral link provided by Revolut.

‍ Incentive

While there was no tangible incentive for the referrer or the invitee, this was a 1-sided referral campaign where the referrer would climb higher in the waitlist queue for every successful referral, giving them early access sooner.

For the referrer: To climb higher in the queue and get early access sooner, one had to successfully refer friends to the waitlist.

For the invitee: Join the waitlist through the referral link.

Revolut didn’t release their app to all waitlist participants at once, instead they slowly onboarded the top participants until the waitlist was exhausted—a beta program.

This tactic has two benefits:

• It allows for controlled adoption to avoid overloading the tech infrastructure and to get a deeper understanding of the upcoming users.
• It created a feeling of exclusivity among the beta program participants as they are the first to use the anticipated product—thus creating passionate fans before the launch.

Revolut understood that word of mouth could be their most powerful tool for growth. So, like most successful startups, they fuelled word of mouth by putting most of their effort into the product to make something so good that customers are happy to share with friends.


Their growth team ensured that all aspects of their product, both offline and online, create unique and shareable experiences.

From creative packaging to network effects embedded in its core features, Revolut’s product is made to be shared.


Revolut utilizes referral programs for many of its strategic goals to facilitate that sharing desire and ignite word of mouth.

They incentivize their best customers to refer friends in exchange for generous rewards to grow their customer base with more of their quality users.

They increase the adoption rate of their new features by offering them for free in exchange for referrals.

They acquire early adopters of their product in new markets before they even launch by creating tempting waitlists with the ability to climb in the queue if you refer friends.

Written by:

Nikitas Filosofof

Nik has launched products in many industries for himself and clients. He's responsible for growth at Viral Loops, and he has worked in marketing since he was 17. Passionate about applying psychology to marketing. Favorite number: 42. Let's connect on LinkedIn

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How Lokalise contributed to Revolut's massive growth

''It probably takes longer for Apple to review the app than for us to roll out a new language with Lokalise.'' 

Head of Mobile at Revolut

Key integrations used with Lokalise

Localization drives global growth.

Revolut needs no introductions – the name speaks for itself. The globally recognised fintech company has over 12 million customers, and that number is growing by the day, if not by the hour.

This massive growth is partly due to the company's strategic decision to localise its product from the early days.

When Revolut was launched back in 2015, the app was available across the entire EU but only supported one language – English. ''When you are a very small startup, you kind of have to choose your battles,'' says Edward Cooper, Head of Mobile at Revolut. Then, as the company started to scale, the team began considering localisation. 

''We looked at different case studies and it was clear that when, for instance, some startups and scale-ups began localising their product, they saw a big uplift in business in other markets,'' Edward explains. Despite still being quite small, the team decided to invest in localisation. That's when they started to look for a solid, reliable partner. 

Enter, Lokalise.

Scaling and growing together

Prior to choosing Lokalise, Revolut considered other translation management systems, which, they admit, were neither user nor startup-friendly. Other tools they tried seemed old school, with difficult-to-use user interfaces, as well as too expensive for a small startup to afford.

Lokalise, on the other hand, was different.

''Lokalise had a great UI, and its image recognition on screenshots was really top-notch. The fact that it had great API documentation and the fact that the pricing would allow us to scale from a small startup to a larger startup – those were the key things for us.'' 

Back then, Revolut was just around 20 or 30 people with no dedicated team for localisation, so the ability to automate as much as possible was another crucial aspect. Because Lokalise allowed Revolut to automate many things, the team was able to take up projects that they wouldn't even think about doing before.

''With Lokalise, we could upload all our files, upload the images, and quickly check and fix everything. We could also quickly write scripts so that our developers could easily upload and download the latest files without even having to necessarily log into the tool.''

Key features used:

• Over-the-air SDKs
• Screenshots

Today, the Revolut team is 2000 people strong, and their translations are done by a third-party – the translation company RWS Moravia . A lot of things have changed within their translation management process, but the team is still able to use Lokalise thanks to its flexibility.

''When we started to work with RWS Moravia, they already had their own internal workflow. Lokalise was flexible enough to allow them to simply plug their workflow into it. And we were able to plug our workflow into Lokalise and organise the translation processes really well, not only with internal Revolut people but an external company as well.''

Another thing that sold Revolut on Lokalise was the similar mindset that both teams had when it came to product development. There were times when someone from Revolut would suggest a feature and, 30 seconds later, they would receive a reply from Lokalise: ''Cool, we can have that in 24 hours!'' 

As Ed puts it, ''Lokalise scaled with us.''

''Without Lokalise, Revolut's growth would be slower''

Edward thinks that more languages not only help brands look more serious but also give the product a competitive advantage, allowing the company to access multiple age groups. For example, in the case of Revolut, having local languages made their product more appealing to older people who didn’t speak multiple languages.

Up to today, Revolut has added more than 30 languages and they continue to add more. The next language to add is usually chosen based on where it's going to have the biggest impact business-wise.

Then, once the language is picked, the localization process is really fast: it takes 48 hours for the translation agency to provide translations, a few more hours for the in-house people to ''sanity-check'' them, and a click of a button to release the new language. 

Ed jokes that ''It probably takes longer for Apple to review the app than it takes to actually get the translations done.'' And in case some translation is not right or any other update is necessary, the team can quickly jump on, make the necessary changes, and release the update with the over-the-air SDK – one of the team's favorite features.

What if Revolut didn't have Lokalise?

''If we had struggled with spreadsheets, or if our developers had struggled to find the most up-to-date translations and things like that, that would have definitely slowed us down. Because we had a battle-tested tool right from the start, that allowed us to free up everybody’s time to focus on mission-critical stuff.''

When asked who should be using Lokalise, Edward says ''Pretty much anyone.'' More specifically, those are small startups that are just starting out, middle-sized companies looking for an all-in-one solution, as well as large enterprises with complex and advanced workflows.

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Meet Revolut

Revolut enables its customers to spend, save and invest their money, all in one easy to use app. Their mission is to build the world’s first truly global financial services super app that empowers customers, allowing them to get the most from their money, wherever they are in the world, from a single provider.

Entering new markets and expanding globally is critical to their mission and something that sets Revolut apart. In order to maintain their fast pace of growth, they identified Deel as a partner that could help them find the right people - new joiners and relocating employees - for their new markets. They chose Deel because of our global presence, hands-on support, and ability to keep up their speed.

“Thanks to Deel, we get to hire local talent in any country where we want to expand long before we set up the entity there. Effectively, this gives us a head start.” Luka Besling, HR Manager at Revolut.

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Revolut onboards 12% more users with Onfido

increase in customers onboarded

Faster average results delivery, the challenge.

Throughout its rapid growth, Revolut has faced the challenge of verifying the identities of its global customers without sacrificing accessibility or slick user experience. The Revolut team needed to deliver a next-generation onboarding experience to customers, while making sure that fraudulent users were kept off of their platform.

Performing KYC checks is a regulatory requirement for digital banks like Revolut. But, to build the bank of the future, Revolut needed to go above and beyond the regulations in knowing their customers, and catch those attempting to commit identity fraud in order to create accounts.

The solution

We worked together to create an onboarding workflow that delivers the security of a face-to-face interaction within Revolut’s polished app. The resultant combined identity document and facial check is seamless for customers and allows Revolut to gain a higher degree of certainty about the identity of their users.

Lewis Tuff, Lead Platform Engineer at Revolut

The results

Regulated in the UK, Revolut is operational in 28 different countries with plans to launch in another 16. They needed a partner that could sustain this expansion by verifying a large range of identity documents from throughout the world. In the 7 months since integration, Onfido verified Revolut users from 168 different countries, ensuring that nationality is no barrier to opening a Revolut account.

Before integration had started, the Onfido and Revolut tech teams set up a Slack channel. This is where some of the magic began to happen: Revolut’s back-end and mobile developers fired off questions and got instant responses from Onfido’s team as they integrated Onfido’s workflow.

Since migrating to Onfido, Revolut has increased the volume of checks they run by 293%. Throughout this massive growth, Onfido has sustained a 99.998% uptime and has completed checks at an average of 38 seconds faster than Revolut’s previous provider. This has allowed Revolut to increase the number of users onboarded by 12%, which translates into huge gains.

About Revolut

Revolut are a mobile-first online bank, with over 6m+ customers. They are FCA authorized and operate across the European Economic Area.

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Revolut automates its compliance processes for continued growth into new territories with CUBE Automated Regulatory Intelligence

What did Revolut do prior to CUBE?

Before CUBE, Revolut relied on individuals conducting manual trawls of the internet for regulatory change. These were then inserted into an Excel spreadsheet.

The previous process involved compliance team members manually reviewing publicly available sources to identify applicable regulatory requirements. Each piece of applicable legislation was then manually inputted into a spreadsheet at paragraph level and requirements that were identified as ‘applicable’ were translated into Revolut’s policies.

Revolut had noted that, without a RegTech solution they risked slow business growth and that there was potential reputational and financial damage if they failed to comply with regulatory requirements.

What problem was CUBE brought in to solve?

Ensure confidence in the process and produce reliable audit trails.

Firstly, the existing manual process was not watertight. It did not give the team confidence that they had covered all relevant regulatory changes. In the event of regulatory audits, the team would struggle to find out who had done what, what regulations had been captured, which had been implemented, who was responsible etc. There wasn’t a clear audit trail or ability to have oversight of the process.

Revolut wanted a solution that would allow them to automate the process, but also have oversight of who was doing what, where, across different departments (in a workflow).

Have a solution that was able to capture multiple jurisdictions as they grow

Revolut wanted a solution that would capture regulations across multiple jurisdictions. Revolut would be looking to scale in the coming years and months. They wanted a solution that would be able to aid them in their transition to new regulatory territories.

When you move into new jurisdictions, if you want to operate you will need a banking license and to sign a contract with Visa/Mastercard etc. to say that you will comply with the regulatory requirements of the jurisdiction that you are moving into. In the past, the only way to achieve this was 1) to have a person on the ground in that jurisdiction, enacting and monitoring regulatory change, or 2) to hire lawyers from different jurisdictions. In Revolut’s case, neither of these options was viable as they look to move into 40 countries. It would be too expensive. They needed a RegTech solution instead.

Have a solution that would translate non-English regulations

As above, as Revolut moves into new territories it needs to adhere to local regulations. In order to adhere to those regulations, they need to understand them. As such, they need to be translated into English. Revolut was looking for a solution that would enable them to have access to translated regulations without hiring freelance transcribers who, again, are costly across 40 jurisdictions.

Why did Revolut choose CUBE?

Revolut chose CUBE as it had:

• The most extensive coverage of jurisdictions, sources, and business areas.
• The ability to integrate via API to show regulatory workflows and dashboards, offering complete oversight of the regulatory change process.
• The ability to quickly add new jurisdictions to Revolut’s regulatory arsenal – in a matter of days.

How has CUBE helped Revolut’s regulatory change process?

Oversight of the regulatory change process.

Revolut has integrated CUBE with a workflow and a dashboard tool. This enables the team to create tickets for actions needed to implement regulatory change, which feeds into a dashboard function that allows the team to have complete oversight of the regulatory change process across all departments.

This allows the Head of Regulatory Change to see what alerts have come in, what topics they pertain to, which regulatory tickets sit with who, who is enacting them, the time it takes, etc. It also allows the team to pull tailored metrics around areas of interest.

In the event of a regulatory audit, this gives Revolut confidence that they haven’t missed anything and can show their regulatory change process from beginning to end, without the need for scrambling.

Expansion into new jurisdictions

CUBE is the only offering that has coverage across all jurisdictions in which Revolut is looking to expand. CUBE enables Revolut therefore to comply in 40 different jurisdictions without the need for people on the ground or costly lawyers. With CUBE you can just set up a relevant profile and you’re away (with necessary fine-tuning).

Translation across jurisdictions

As mentioned above, CUBE provides automated translation which means that growth into new territories is made easier and more cost-effective, without the need for external translators.

About Revolut

Revolut is building the world’s first truly global financial super app to help people get more from their money. In 2015, Revolut launched in the UK offering a multi-currency card, money transfers, and currency exchange. Today, more than 20 million customers around the world use dozens of Revolut’s innovative banking products to make more than 250 million transactions a month. Across personal and business accounts, Revolut helps customers improve their financial health, gives them more control, and connects people seamlessly worldwide.

How CUBE can help

The regulatory landscape is constantly evolving, with emerging issues such as climate risk-taking centre stage for 2022. This year, most financial regulators are looking to widen their regulatory parameters to include every factor of ESG, from climate change to corporate governance. What does this mean for compliance teams? A deluge of emerging regulations and expectations.

CUBE is a SaaS-based RegTech designed to take the complexity out of regulatory change management using artificial intelligence and automation to deliver Automated Regulatory Intelligence. Whether you’re a large, multinational bank, or a small financial organisation with up to a handful of compliance officers, we’ve got a suite of products tailored to you.

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I’m a victim of scammers. But Revolut says ‘no’ to a refund

The company seems to hold me entirely responsible for the fact £40,000 was stolen

I desperately need help after ­falling victim to a scam resulting in my Revolut business account being emptied of £40,000. The company is refusing a refund.

It happened in February while I was staying up a mountain in Italy with no internet and a poor mobile phone signal. I declined a call from a hidden number, then took a call from my accountant asking me to pick up the phone to Revolut because there were “some suspicious attempts to access my account”.

When they called back, I answered, believing I was talking to Revolut’s anti-fraud staff , not least because the person had full access to my account details and was able to quote past ­transactions, even verification codes sent to confirm them.

I was told they were contacting me as someone using a suspicious device was attempting to log into my account. After I confirmed it was not me, they said they would restrict access to my account. As part of a “security check”, they sent two verification codes, which I read back to them.

I now know I was talking to a fraudster who used these codes to set up new payees, and to go on and make 38 withdrawals from my account in a matter of minutes, cleaning out my account.

Since then, I have been trying to get my money returned. I have no idea how the scammers were able to gain access to my account , and I’m shocked that Revolut’s security appears to have been bypassed.

I did not hand over any personal login details to anyone, so I don’t understand how this happened.

Revolut is refusing to share with me the selfie they say was allegedly used to access the account. They also stopped trying to recover my funds after just 10 days.

The Metropolitan police are currently conducting an investigation.

I feel the company has held me entirely responsible for the fraud, without looking into its own role into how its systems were apparently overcome.

What would you do in my shoes? LG, by email

This letter should serve as a wake-up call to anyone who has a significant sum held in a ­Revolut account. My advice would be to move your balance to a conventional bank as quickly as possible – one that will probably refund you if you fall victim to a sophisticated scam such as this. Revolut still does not have a UK banking licence .

It has confirmed to me that it will not be refunding you.

Revolut is not signed up to the c ontingent reimbursement model code (CRM code), a voluntary code for banks and financial firms that outlines when defrauded customers should get back their cash. As part of this, banks have promised to refund scam victims who have not been unduly negligent.

Revolut says: “We are sorry to hear of LG’s case, and any instance where our customers have been targeted by ruthless and sophisticated criminals. Each potential fraud case concerning a Revolut customer is carefully investigated and assessed independently of other cases.

“We take a data-driven approach to identify scam activity and use sophisticated fraud modelling for inbound and outbound transactions to protect ­customers from falling victim to fraud, including clear, unskippable warnings and direct interventions by our specialist fraud prevention teams. Revolut will never phone you without first confirming via our secure in-app chat.” In effect, it believes you were negligent.

That’s all very well, but the number of complaints to Action Fraud by Revolut customers has risen from 567 in February 2023 to 1,086 for February 2024.

What would I do in your shoes? Take the matter to the Financial Ombudsman Service, which, I suspect, will, after a long wait, find in your favour. And given the large sum involved, you may want to hire a solicitor to help bring the claim.

Sarah Spruce, a partner with TLW Solicitors, told me her law firm was helping 90 Revolut fraud victims bring claims against the company.

Other customers should take note of how this company operates.

We welcome letters but cannot answer individually. Email us at [email protected] or write to Consumer Champions, Money, the Guardian, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Please include a daytime phone number. Submission and publication of all letters is subject to our terms and conditions .

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Case study: Creditspring

Business  ·  20 December 2022 Katharine Yacovone

🖥️ Website: https://creditspring.co.uk/ 💼 Industry: Small loans and credit 📈 Stage: Startup 📍 Headquarters: UK 💳 Product used: The Revolut Business API

When small loans provider Creditspring got started, the team wanted to take a fresh approach to financial borrowing: making the process simple, transparent, and effective. This meant moving away from the typical interest approach – which can lead to long-term debt – and instead introducing a subscription-based model. By paying a fixed monthly fee, customers can take on smaller loans to build credit and develop financial resilience.

Creditspring couldn't make this work for customers without prioritising clarity and speed. And forward-thinking ideas call for cutting-edge technology.

Application program interfaces, or APIs, are an essential piece of adapting to the digital age for businesses, some even calling this the ‘ API Economy .’ APIs are technologies that let different systems communicate with each other, so companies can automate and programme operations across platforms to their heart’s desire: cutting down on admin and speeding up services. It’s no wonder 97% of businesses agree APIs are massively important to their survival, according to a report from Rapid API. Basically, they’re the powerhouse of business proficiency.

But, many businesses still face challenges introducing this software effectively. When Creditspring sought the right fix for its rapid expansion in 2021, the team needed an easy-to-implement solution that helped them better serve their customers. Spoiler: the Revolut Business API was the answer.

Challenge: what were their growing pains?

As Creditspring grew, manually processing customer loans just wouldn’t cut it. At the peak of this original approach for loan batching, the team spent as much as two hours per day completing customer transactions. That’s right, nearly a quarter of the workday, on top of reconciliations and error chasing. Now that time is freed up to focus on issues that really matter to them – and their members.

“Growing from 10,000 members at the end of 2020 to 142,000 at the end of September 2022 meant we had to future-proof the business to ensure we could continue to scale without compromising the level of service to customers. We aim to continue growing through the cost-of-living crisis, focusing on delivering simple yet effective products to help our members through those difficult times,” said Jérémy Fouilloux, Senior Brand Manager at Creditspring.

To keep up their high level of service and accessibility, Creditspring needed an integrated solution for loan disbursement. Rather than pushing one loan request down an assembly line, they looked for a tool that combined the steps, letting them speedily release money and stretch for continuous scalability.

Solution: so, how did they fix it?

Creditspring adopted the Revolut Business API to stay on top of efficiency despite customer growth. They could quickly integrate this software into their workflow to automate and streamline the loan disbursement process. The API offered high flexibility and accessibility, letting Creditspring get money to customers quickly without waiting for manual payments to go through.

With the Revolut Business API, Creditspring could efficiently work through batches of loans and scale fast. But it didn’t stop there. Eventually, they began using more of Revolut Business’s product offering to improve other parts of the business.

“After signing up just for automated payments, we’ve used Revolut Business’s virtual cards to better manage employee expenses as well as to automate refunds and send referral fees to customers. We took advantage of the automated Xero feeds, to make accounting for and reconciling a large volume of customer transactions much more streamlined,” adds Charles McCulloch, Finance Manager at Creditspring.

That wasn’t all. Their accounting and reconciliation saw a boost – automatically updating ledgers through their Revolut Business account, marking loans as disbursed, and feeding information directly into Xero, this new approach demanded very little manual admin. Not only did the API help the team keep up with customer loan demands, but the positive impact spread across the business.

Results: what did they get out of it?  

Creditspring’s use of Revolut’s Business API saved them as much as 25% on manual admin and processing time, allowing them to give out around 187K loans worth £53M since implementation. On top of saving a massive amount of time on workload, the automation prevented manual entry mistakes and duplications, cutting errors by 300%.

The Revolut Business API also helped Creditspring maintain an above-average score of 4.7 on Trustpilot , where 9 in 10 customers have left ‘excellent’ reviews. Creditspring transformed its entire business model thanks to our API, allowing them to focus on their goal of offering a healthy alternative to credit cards and payday loans.

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Want to learn more? Check out the Revolut Business API on our website to see how these software solutions could help out your business too. Open your Revolut Business account in minutes to start doing business globally.