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Revolut Ltd.

Company type	Private
Industry	FinTech
Founded	1 July 2015; 9 years ago (2015-07-01)
Founder	Nikolay Storonsky Vlad Yatsenko
Headquarters	London, England, UK
Key people	Nikolay Storonsky (CEO) Vladyslav Yatsenko (CTO) Ronald "Ron" Oliveira (CEO, Revolut USA)
Products	current accounts, debit cards, stock trading, currency exchange, foreign exchange, insurance
Services	Peer-to-peer payments, Currency Exchange
Revenue	£58.24 million (2018)
Number of employees	1,596 (2019)
Website	www.revolut.com

Revolut is a financial technology company that offers banking services and wants your pp. Headquartered in London, England, it was founded in 2015 by Nikolay Storonsky and the man himself, Vlad The Chad. It offers accounts featuring currency exchange, debit cards, virtual cards, Apple Pay, interest-bearing "vaults", commission-free stock trading, crypto, commodities, and other services. Revolut has expanded into new markets such as Japan and expanding staff from 1500 to around 5000. In 2020 it reached profitability and, with a £4.2 billion valuation became the UK's most valuable fintech. In January 2021 it applied for pp.

History

Vlad

Services

Revolut offers banking services including GBP and EUR bank accounts, debit cards, fee-free currency exchange, stock trading, cryptocurrency exchange and peer-to-peer payments. Revolut's mobile app supports spending and ATM withdrawals in 120 currencies and sending in 29 currencies directly from the app. Payments at weekends incur an extra fee of 0.5% to 2% protecting them against exchange rate fluctuations.

It also provides customers access to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and XRP by exchanging with 25 fiat currencies. A fee of 1.5% for buying or selling applies. Crypto cannot be deposited or spent, only converted back to fiat inside Revolut.

It provides an equities trading facility, with access to a range of US stocks and fractional share purchase/sale. Stocks purchased in the app cannot be transferred to another broker, but must be sold/converted back to cash, which can then be withdrawn.

Controversies

Automated suspension of accounts

Revolut, in common with traditional financial institutions, uses algorithms to identify money laundering, fraud and other criminal activity, but unlike the rest of the banking industry, Revolut's algorithms additionally trigger an automated suspension of accounts. Revolut explains that "the system is programmed to temporarily lock an account and place it in a queue, until one of our compliance agents can review the case".

It is increasingly reported that Revolut's algorithms suspend a growing number of accounts in error for weeks or months at a time because Revolut does not have sufficient compliance agents to review the automated suspensions, and that while Revolut pays no interest on the large suspended balances, Revolut can earn interest on the funds in wholesale money markets. Customers whose accounts are suspended are blocked from contacting Revolut's usual support channel and instead receive automated responses from a chatbot. The Daily Telegraph reported that Revolut suspended an account containing £90,000 for more than two months and that another customer travelled 500 miles from Auvergne in France to Revolut's London offices in an unsuccessful attempt to recover £15,000 in an account that Revolut had similarly frozen without any justification being given. In a further case reported by The Times, Revolut suspended and subsequently closed a business account containing €300,000 belonging to Priorité Energie, which "helps low-income families in Paris to insulate their homes under a government initiative", preventing the company from paying its staff.

According to Finews.com, Revolut's public internet forums contain almost 500 complaints by customers about locked accounts and a lack of response from Revolut's support team. Many customers in each forum thread report a total loss of access to their money. Finews also reported that Revolut asked a customer to provide to Revolut her tax statement and subsequently tax statements of people who had sent her small amounts of money, and that when she failed to provide the tax statements of those third parties, Revolut blocked her account without giving due notice.

Employment practices

In March 2019, Wired published an exposé of the company's employment practices and work culture. This found evidence of unpaid work, high staff turnover and employees being ordered to work weekends to meet performance indicators. A later article in December 2019 by Sifted noted that Revolut had a higher rating than its peers on Glassdoor.

In June 2020, Wired published a further exposé of Revolut's dismissal of employees during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which employees, particularly in Kraków, were given the choice of being terminated for underperformance or a mutual agreement to leave the company voluntarily, in order to reduce the headline number of 62 redundancies announced by Revolut. The report explained that "Current and former Revolut employees say staff were coerced into accepting terminations, even though the company had no legal grounds to fire them" and that employees in Porto were pressured into agreeing to a salary sacrifice scheme in order to keep their jobs. According to Wired, in a message sent to the 495-strong customer support team on Slack shortly after the salary sacrifice scheme was announced, head of support Inna Grynova urged them to participate:

“So far, almost 20 per cent of our employees globally have submitted their sacrifices. In Support we’ve gathered only 44 submitions (out of 495 employees) which is a very small number. Our goal is to use SSS as an alternative to the need of employees redundancy and other cost cuts. So the success of SSS depends on all of us. If it won’t be enough, unfortunately we would need to go for the other steps, which we’ll try to avoid. The positive impact of SSS can be achieved only when we work together.”

References

1. "Revolut company profile". AngelList. Retrieved 11 January 2016.
2. "Revolut revenue". Craft. Retrieved 15 November 2019.
3. "Revolut Company Profile". Craft. Retrieved 9 December 2019.
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10. Dillet, Romain (20 July 2015). "Revolut Raises $2.3 Million For Its Mobile Foreign Exchange Service". TechCrunch. Retrieved 11 January 2016.
11. "What foreign exchange rate will I get? | Revolut Help Centre". www.revolut.com.
12. "Revolut adds XRP and Bitcoin Cash support". TechCrunch. 2018-05-24. Retrieved 2021-04-14.
13. Braileanu, Rob. "Why has my account been locked and how to regain access?". Revolut. Revolut Ltd. Retrieved 23 February 2020.
14. Marks, Oliver (17 January 2019). "Revolut's clumsy automated bank compliance results in frozen accounts and lack of customer service". ZDNet. CBS Interactive. Retrieved 23 February 2020.
15. Barker, Sam (21 January 2020). "Revolut customers locked out of accounts 'for weeks'". The Telegraph. The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 23 February 2020.
16. Palmer, Kate (8 February 2020). "Monzo and Revolut: customer complaints are mounting at digital banks". The Times. Retrieved 23 February 2020.
17. Hunt, Marianna (25 January 2000). "Revolut could face lawsuit from customers locked out of their accounts. This seems to be getting worse in uk". The Telegraph. The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 23 February 2020.
18. Hunt, Marianna (24 January 2020). "Ex-UCL lecturer forced to travel to London from France in attempts to unblock digital bank account". The Telegraph. The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 27 February 2020.
19. Dunkley, Emma (23 February 2020). "Nikolay Storonsky's Revolut freezes accounts in money-laundering bungle". The Times. Retrieved 23 February 2020.
20. "Revolut: Blocked Accounts". finews.com. finews AG. 1 September 2020. Retrieved 1 September 2020.
21. "Account locked - support chat doesn't work". Revolut Community. Retrieved 21 May 2020.
22. "Blocked Account - Unhelpful Customer Service". Revolut Community. Retrieved 21 May 2020.
23. "Account blocked for no reason?". Revolut Community. Retrieved 21 May 2020.
24. "My accout has been locked and i cant access my money!". Revolut Community. Retrieved 21 May 2020.
25. "Locked account". Revolut Community. Retrieved 21 May 2020.
26. "Account blocked from my revolut account". Revolut Community. Retrieved 21 May 2020.
27. "COVID 19 sob more than 13k Portfolio - Revolut Locked Account Since 13/03/2020 due funds verification - Sharing My User Experience! [UNSOLVED]". Revolut Community. Retrieved 21 May 2020.
28. Mellino, Emiliano (28 February 2019). "Revolut insiders reveal the human cost of a fintech unicorn's wild rise". Wired. Retrieved 1 March 2019.
29. "Digital banks Monzo, Revolut, Starling and N26 compared". Sifted. Retrieved 20 December 2019.
30. Emiliano, Mellino (4 June 2020). "Revolut staff claim they've been told to quit their jobs or be fired". Wired. Retrieved 5 June 2020.

External links

• Official website
• Media related to Revolut at Wikimedia Commons

• Foreign exchange companies
• Digital currency exchanges
• Financial services companies of the United Kingdom
• Financial technology companies
• Mobile payments
• Online payments
• Payment systems
• Payment service providers
• Cryptocurrencies