1 week Ago By Lauren Towner
Revolut Business ‘ General Manager’ James Gibson reveals why the time is ripe for a fresh chapter in the neobank’s already successful story For a while now, Revolut has been one of the big European and UK neobanks. Challenging the established order and providing a fully digital, accessible user experience and new exciting products for the modern consumer. Amongst a small crowd of similarly disruptive companies, it’s now officially the largest challenger in Europe and has a presence around the world too.
The digital-only bank recently announced 10 million customers in the UK , bringing its customer base across Europe to 45 million. After finally receiving a long anticipated banking licence from the UK Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) in July 2024 , it is now eating up more market share, from incumbents. A new retail wealth and investment platform was recently added to their competitive offering.
Does this change of status and the similar growth of their competitors mean we’re entering a new era of challenger banking? One sign of maturity in banking has to be the presence of a formidable business offering. This is certainly the case for Revolut, with the most recent global annualised revenues surpassing $500million. According to Revolut general manager James Gibson, it’s now onboarding over 20,000 businesses every month and processing around £17billion worth of transactions.
After seven years of growth, Gibson still feels it is “at the start of a journey.” Already live in Europe and the US, there is more ground to cover in those regions, and this year it launched in Singapore too. We asked him what business banking means to Revolut, some of the interesting products it’s offering, and whether or not that “challenger” label is still appropriate.
The Fintech Magazine: How important is it to have a business-to-business offering as a bank? James Gibson: “I suppose every business is different, but this is a natural extension of the personal banking option. Soon after launching the personal product, Nik and Vlad [co-founders Nikolay Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko] and co. realised that a lot of their new happy customers had businesses as well, and faced similar problems, such as high foreign exchange fees and difficulty with international payments.
“Since then, Revolut Business has evolved to solve these, and more complex problems for businesses that maybe don’t have an equivalent on the personal side, but the core of the product – the app, the rates, the ease of use – is relatively similar. “We’re a couple of years behind the personal product, and businesses have different needs to individuals, so there’s a lot for us to build. But it’s a key part of our overall strategy, not least for how both sides of the brand link to each other.
A lot of our customers on the business side learned about it from being retail customers.” The Fintech Magazine What are some of the key benefits of your business offering? James Gibson: “With Revolut Pay, you can have a retail customer in Singapore, buying from a merchant in the UK, and at checkout you can confirm payment on your phone, just by using your Revolut account, and merchants on the business side get paid directly by the customer. This is where there’s the crossover between retail and business.
“The aim is to change how people interact with their money, and we want to do this for people around the world” “We also have a product called Revtags, which is using tags to pay anyone. So now we have this global network of 45 million-plus people, as well as all of our businesses, who can send money together, without going through complicated financial schemes. “Recently announced Revolut BillPay is a little bit different, and there’s less crossover with retail there.
If you have a business account and get sent invoices, through Revolut BillPay you can ingest them into your system without having to manually enter them, and it will schedule the payments for you rather than manually plugging them in. So it’s really a time-saving play for businesses.” The Fintech Magazine: Why did you want to expand into Singapore? James Gibson: “We launched there a couple of months ago and are seeing great traction.
Singapore is a tech-enabled, forward-thinking country and there are many, many businesses located there. It’s a hub within APAC for global businesses and a lot of them have some form of international operations, which obviously suits our product very well. “We’re also seeing success on the personal banking side, which typically leads to growth on the business side too, something we’ve seen in other top markets, like Ireland.
On top of that, we have a good working relationship with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the regulator.” The Fintech Magazine: What opportunities are there for businesses in the APAC/SEA region? James Gibson: “It’s obviously a huge growth area in general, and for a company like ours, given the number of markets, and the amount of foreign exchange there is across the region, it’s a huge opportunity. “Also, a lot of these countries are jumping straight into tech-enabled banking and skipping out this sort of middle ground, hybrid model we’ve had in the UK, which is obviously great for us.
“A number of these countries have quite forward-thinking regulatory regimes designed to help tech solutions flow. So lots of opportunities and lots of growing countries. You’ll see more of us in the coming years.
” The Fintech Magazine: Has Revolut surpassed the challenger label? James Gibson: “It’s a good question that I’ve not been asked before! I think the change we’ve seen in the last five to 10 years has been quite significant, and we’re very proud to have played a part in that. “For me, a challenger is someone who challenges norms and fundamentally improves customer experience. And this doesn’t stop when you reach a specific size.
If you think about a company like Amazon, for example, it’s obviously one of the biggest companies in the world but I believe it is still a challenger to established norms and ways of doing things, despite the fact that it’s absolutely enormous. “So I think it’s more of a mentality, and we still strongly have that. We see many areas for improvement in our products, but also new products that we can bring to market.
So no, I would still give us the challenger label.” The Fintech Magazine What’s it like working for Revolut and what’s the “special sauce” that the company brings? James Gibson: “I have a few more grey hairs than I did when I started working at Revolut seven years ago! But joking aside, it’s a great place to be. The thing I love most is the quality of people.
We are lucky to have a very hard-working, passionate and diverse group of people who are truly committed to building something really exciting and solving our customers’ problems. “The other is the level of ambition that the company has, we’re not just trying to create a new business or personal current account. That’s not the aim.
The aim is to change how people interact with their money, and we want to do this for people around the world. “And that level of ambition is very, very motivating. It probably sets us apart from a lot of other companies.
” This article was published in The Paytech Magazine Issue 15, Page 22-21.
