Revolut makes its Nordic entrance: Looks to become your financial control center

Michael Jakobsen
februar 22, 2018

Michael Jakobsen

@Michael

British startup Revolut is ready to take on the North. The ambitious company offers a wide variety of financial services ranging from credit to insurance with the hope of becoming the future linchpin for all your financial services.

As a busy traveller, Nikolay often experienced issues moving money across borders. He constantly found himself opening new bank accounts and transferring money through various currency exchanges until he decided to do something about it himself. Years later, his personal mission has materialized into the Revolut of today, a solid business boasting more than 1.3 million European users, without investing in marketing efforts.

At the same time, Revolut has managed to keep a constant development going. Therefore, Revolut is no longer a case of a handful of financial services, but a full-service bank, which even offers things the banks may not.

“We have continued to add more and more products such as credit, insurance, premium- and business accounts, crypto-currency. Today, we are more than a full service bank, because we actually offer products that the bank does not,” says Nikolay Storonsky, Founder & CEOCEO betyder Chief Executive Officer og er den øverste leder i en virksomhed, ansvarlig for den overordnede strategi og ledelse. CEO’en rapporterer normalt ti... More of Revolut.

And now the time has come to conquer the Nordic region.

High expectations for the Danish marked

Revolut’s venture into the Nordics signals that the company is ready to battle it out for its share of the Nordic users. In Denmark, Revolut has already amassed roughly 5.000 users, without spending a dime on marketing. Needless to say, that Revolut has high expectations towards the Danish market and the Nordic region as a whole.

Accordingly, Revolut has set an ambitious goal of achieving 50-100.000 Danish users at the end of this year with 20 % using Revolut as their primary bank account and service. Here, Revolut has teamed up with Danske Bank to offer local, Nordic bank accounts. It may sound easy. But at Revolut there is no rest for the weary as the company constantly try to progress and create new innovative additions to its service offerings.

”Recently we introduced pay as you go insurance. Which nobody is really doing. For example: if I land in Denmark I can activate my insurance at a fixed cost per day. And when I get back to the UK I can immediately deactivate it. So it is much cheaper than that I would have to pay normally,” says Nikolay Storonsky.

Innovation creates value

Through a closer look at the organisation’s internals, it becomes apparent that Revolut is employing various innovative initiatives, which help cut cost and create new value for users and partners.

Here, a deep focus on the development and integration of AI systems has taken root. A significant innovation is the application of AI to automatically identify suspicious transactions.

“We employ many data-scientists and developers in the development of AI systems used to identify suspicious transactions. The identification process is fully automated, requiring no human touch. This allows us to process huge volumes of transactions without risking problems with compliance,” says Nikolay Storonsky.

Chat-bot reduces support-staff

Looking at the support system, AI once again plays a key role. Revolut uses a chat-bot to handle most of its support cases with employees standing by to handle more complex needs. This allows Revolut to reduce its number of support staff significantly.

”If you look at other banks who handle roughly the same number of customers that we do, you will typically see them have between 5.000 and 7.000 employees working with support. At Revolut, that number is just 120. This is thanks to the AI-based chat-bot, who delivers automated answers to our users or pass them along to live support, in case of more complex problems,” says Nikolay Storonsky.

The competition does not deter

By all accounts, Revolut looks like a company with both financials and confidence in order. And the ambitious company will need both as it takes on the Nordic market currently occupied by big banks and others startups such as Danish darling Lunar Way.

“I think companies like Lunar War have an advantage from just being local brands. But for us, in terms of the brand, our tone of voice and how we connect with the younger 25-35 year olds, which is our average age group, I think that will not only resonate well here, but I also think we provide a better and more complete experience. For instance, none of our competitors give you a multi-currency bank account in seconds. None of these guys lets you buy, hold and sell Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum in seconds. O´so what Revolut is doing is not just improving something that banks are doing. Its doing something on another level,” says Chad West, who is responsible for PR and marketing at Revolut and continues

“It is our belief, that customers in the future are going to want just one app for all their finances. And that is Revolut’s vision – to become sort of a financial control center where not just your banking and your crypto’s, but your insurance, credit and various other things will be online as well.”