Revolut
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Revolut launches publicly in Singapore, signs deal with Mastercard
London-based fintech startup Revolut has two pieces of news to announce this week. First, Revolut is expanding to Singapore after a long beta period. The company already has 30,000 customers there and anyone can open an account now.
Singapore residents will be able to take advantage of all of Revolut’s core features. You can open an account from your phone, get a card and start spending anywhere in the world.
Revolut supports Singapore dollar as well as 13 other currencies. You can top up your account, and send and receive money from the app.
With a free account you can convert money in the app without any markup fee on weekdays up to S$9000 per month. You can also withdraw money anywhere in the world without any fee, up to S$9000 per month.
Premium accounts cost S$9.99 per month and Metal accounts cost S$19.99 per month in Singapore. You get higher limits and a few additional features with Metal.
Revolut is currently available in the U.K., Europe and Australia. There are 7 million Revolut customers in total. The company is still working on its launch in the U.S. and Canada for later this year.
The other piece of news is that Revolut has signed a global partnership with Mastercard. Revolut has already been working with Mastercard to issue cards, so this is an expansion of the current deal.
Revolut can now issue cards that work on the Mastercard network in any market where Mastercard is accepted, which represents around 210 countries. It doesn’t mean that Revolut will launch in 210 countries. But the startup says that the first Revolut cards in the U.S. will work on Mastercard.
It also doesn’t mean that Revolut will work exclusively with Mastercard. The company also works with Visa and recently announced a partnership deal. But at least 50% of all existing and future Revolut cards in Europe will be Mastercard branded.
It shouldn’t matter much to end customers, as I have yet to see a place that accepts Mastercard but not Visa, or Visa but not Mastercard. But Revolut is clearly using market competition to its advantage.
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Revolut ramps up customer support with plans to hire 400 people in Porto
Fintech startup Revolut has been growing like crazy and now has 6 million customers. The company has to scale its support team accordingly. That’s why Revolut just announced plans to open a customer operations centre in Porto, Portugal.
There are already 70 people working for Revolut in Porto. Eventually, Revolut plans to hire 400 people in the country. They’ll work on customer support, complaints, investigations and compliance.
And Revolut has been quite successful in Portugal so far. There are currently 250,000 Revolut customers in Portugal, and the company is adding 1,000 new customers per day in the country.
It should help when it comes to hiring local talent. The company is also hiring a growth manager, a communication and PR lead and a community manager in Portugal. Ricardo Macieira, the new growth manager, is the former country manager for Airbnb in Portugal. Rebeca Venâncio, the communication and PR lead, has worked for Microsoft in Portugal. And Miguel Costa, the community manager, has worked for Mog and Nomad Tech.
Earlier this summer, Revolut also announced plans to open a tech hub in Berlin. Originally founded in London, Revolut is slowly building multiple offices across the U.K. and Europe in order to attract local talent.
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Revolut tweaks business accounts with new pricing structure
Fintech startup Revolut announced changes to its business accounts this week. The good news is that if you were thinking about trying Revolut for your business needs, it’s now cheaper to get started. But there are some limits.
While Revolut is better known for its regular consumer accounts that let you receive, send and spend money all around the world, the company has been offering launched business accounts for a couple of years.
The main advantage of Revolut for Business is that you can hold multiple currencies. If you work with clients or suppliers in other countries, you can exchange money and send it to your partners directly from Revolut’s interface.
The company also lets you issue prepaid corporate cards and track expenses. Revolut for Business also has an API so you can automate payments and connect with third-party services, such as Xero, Slack and Zapier.
None of this is changing today. Revolut is mostly tweaking the pricing structure.
Previously, you had to pay £25 per month to access the service with a £100,000 top-up limit per month. Bigger companies had to pay more to raise that ceiling.
Now, Revolut is moving a bit more toward a software-as-a-service approach. Instead of making you pay more to receive and hold more money, you pay more as your team gets bigger and you use Revolut for Business more intensively.
The basic plan is free with two team members, five free local transfers per month and 0.4% in foreign exchange fees. If you want to add more team members or initiate more transfers, you pay some small fees.
If you were paying £25 before, you can now top up as much money as you want in your Revolut account, but there are some limits when it comes to team members (10), local transfers (100 per month) and international transfers (10 per month, interbank exchange rate up to £10,000).
Once again, going over the limits doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to change to a new plan. You’ll pay £0.20 per extra local transfer, £3 per extra international transfer, etc.
Here’s a full breakdown of the new plans:
If you’re a freelancer, there’s now a free plan. You’ll pay 0.4% on foreign exchange and £3 per international transfer, but there’s no top-up limit anymore.
Similarly, the old £7 plan for freelancers has been replaced by a new £7 plan that removes the limit on inbound transfers but adds some limits on transfers.
It’s good news if you’re a small customer. But if you vastly exceed the transfer limit in one of the categories, you might pay more than before. With this change, the company wanted to make Revolut for Business more accessible instead of making small customers subsidize bigger customers with high entry pricing.
Existing customers can switch to a new plan starting today. Revolut plans to switch everyone to the new plans on October 1st, 2019.
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Revolut opens tech hub in Berlin
Fintech startup Revolut is opening a small tech hub in Berlin. There’s already a ton of fintech talent in the city, as it’s the hometown of N26. The company plans to hire 80 people at first for many different tech jobs, from software engineering to data science, product and growth.
And this isn’t just about hiring talent in other cities. Revolut plans to customize its product a bit more for the German market, and more generally Europe.
In many ways, Revolut still feels like a British app. For instance, if you want to change your card PIN code, the company tells you to use an ATM to change it. This is simply not possible in Germany, France and many European markets.
And the team in Berlin will also work on Revolut’s commission-free stock trading feature, a sort of Robinhood competitor for Europe. The company is also working on an app for children, maybe as an alternative to a first bank account.
There are currently 150,000 Revolut users in Germany. The company will have a local marketing and communications team to expand more aggressively in that market.
It’s still hard to create a global fintech app that works all around the world. People manage their money in different ways depending on the country in which they live. And fintech startups are also realizing that, now that they have a solid product offering at home.
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Earnin raises $125M to help workers track and cash out wages in real time
Before Ram Palaniappan founded Earnin, he developed a system for employees at a payments company called UniRush, where he spent eight years as president. If you needed money before payday, he would write you a check from his checking account and when payday rolled around, employees would reimburse him.
Despite being paid what Palaniappan thought were fair wages, his workers often found themselves in a bind, needing access to wages they couldn’t expect to see in their own bank accounts for days.
“This is such a core pain point,” Palaniappan told TechCrunch. “Over three-fourths of the country live paycheck to paycheck … It’s an issue of fairness. We all have gotten used to getting paid every two weeks, but most employees would rather be paid before they work.”
Palaniappan decided to transform what he had been doing as a favor to employees into a real business with Earnin (formerly known as Activehours), a startup that helps hourly, gig and salary workers track their earnings and transfer them to their checking accounts in real time using a mobile application. Today, the company is announcing a $125 million Series C funding from top-tier investors DST Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, Matrix Partners, March Capital Partners, Coatue Management and Ribbit Capital. Palaniappan declined to disclose the valuation.
Earnin founder and chief executive officer Ram Palaniappan
Here’s how it works: An employee signs up on the Earnin app and connects their bank account. Earnin infers the person’s pay cycle and debits their account the amount they’ve borrowed on their payday. Earnin charges no fees or interest; instead, it operates on a pay it forward revenue model some would balk at. Earnin users have the option to “tip” the app after each transaction and that tip, in turn, is used to fund the next user’s withdrawal. If a user tips more than Earnin thinks is reasonable for the given withdrawal, it will notify the user and give them the option to dial back the tip amount.
What the company has found is that users are usually more than happy to contribute to the Earnin community of workers.
“So often, people are trying to help each other out,” Palaniappan said. “That’s the most powerful piece — how much support the community is providing to each other.”
Earnin was launched in 2014 and has previously raised $65 million in venture capital funding. With the latest investment, it will expand its engineering and product teams across its offices in Palo Alto — where it’s headquartered — as well as in Cincinnati and Vancouver.
The app, often among the App Store’s top 10 financial apps, has more than 1 million downloads, the company says, and is used by employees at more than 50,000 companies — many of which check the app every day. Palaniappan says its users are working more than 15 million hours per week. If each user works an estimated 40 hours per week, that means the app has roughly 375,000 weekly active users.
He added that the startup’s growth in the last four years has been “quite remarkable.” Given the investor support it’s received, it’s likely to step into “unicorn” territory soon. Ribbit Capital, for example, is a leading fintech investing firm with capital invested in Coinbase, Revolut, Gusto, Wealthfront, NuBank, Brex and more.
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Revolut gets European banking license in Lithuania
Fintech startup Revolut is now officially a bank. While the startup initially expected to get its European banking license during the first half of 2018, the company has finally come out of the regulatory tunnel with a license in hand.
As expected, Revolut applied for a license through the Bank of Lithuania and is leveraging passporting rules to operate in other European countries. Users will see some changes over the coming months.
First, the company expects to roll out new features in the U.K., France, Germany and Poland. Right now, Revolut is more like an e-wallet that you can top up in many different ways. Users in those countries will get a true current account and a non-prepaid debit card in a few months.
After transferring your money to Revolut’s own infrastructure, funds will be covered up to €100,000 under the European Deposit Insurance Scheme. It should convince more users to switch to Revolut for their salaries and big sums of money.
Eventually, the startup expects to be able to offer overdrafts and loans. All fintech startups end up offering credit at some point as it’s a good way to generate revenue.
There are currently 8,000 to 10,000 people opening a Revolut account per day. Users generate $4 billion in monthly transaction volume.
It’s going to be interesting to see if current accounts will affect growth. It’s currently quite easy to open a Revolut account as users don’t need to go through a lot of KYC processes. This is going to change once the startup starts opening current accounts.
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Revolut is ready to launch in Singapore and Japan
Fintech startup Revolut has been teasing Asian market expansions for more than a year, but it sounds like it might finally happen. The company has secured licenses to operate in Singapore and Japan. It now expects to launch its service in Q1 2019.
In Singapore, the company was granted a Remittance License by the Monetary Authority and a Stored Value Facility approval — these two things combined let Revolut users hold money as well as send and spend money. In Japan, the company has been authorized to operate by Japan’s Finance Service Agency.
According to Revolut, those approvals are enough to launch the service in those countries. But not all features will make their way to Singapore and Japan. Regulation varies from one country to another, so the company might not be able to provide the same limits and feature set everywhere.
At launch, Revolut will focus on the electronic wallet and the payment card. You won’t be able to buy cryptocurrencies, create business accounts and more. Limits should be more or less the same in local currency equivalent.
In Japan, Revolut says it has already signed deals with Rakuten, Sompo Japan Insurance (SJNK) and Toppan. It sounds like there will be new insurance products, special card designs and more.
Revolut plans to open its APAC office in Singapore. Let’s see if Revolut ends up convincing expats to sign up or if they can have a real impact outside of Europe.
And if you’re a potential user in the U.S. or Canada, you’ll have to wait a bit more. Revolut says there will be more news in the coming weeks.
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N26 is launching its bank in the UK
Nearly a year after German fintech startup N26 announced that it would launch its service in the U.K., the company is launching in the U.K. N26 is already quite popular in the Eurozone, with more than 1.5 million customers. In this new market, it will face tough competition from existing players, such as Revolut, Monzo, Starling and many others.
N26 is going to roll out its product in multiple phases. Some lucky few will be able to open an account right away. The startup will then go through its waiting list — 50,000 people already left their email addresses to express interest. After that, anybody will be able to download the app and sign up.
This might sound like a convoluted process, but N26 expects a full public launch in just a few weeks. So it should be quite quick if everything goes as planned.
So what can you expect exactly? British customers will get all the basic N26 stuff with one killer feature — U.K. account numbers and sort codes. This way, customers will be able to receive payments and share banking information with their utility providers just like they would with a regular Barclays or Lloyds account.
When you open an N26 account, you get a true bank account and a MasterCard. Basic accounts are free, and N26 has a proper banking license — your deposits up to €100,000 are guaranteed by the European deposit guarantee scheme. You can then send and receive money and pay with your card. Sending money to other N26 users is instantaneous (they call it MoneyBeam).
N26 recently launched Spaces, a new feature that lets you create sub accounts and put some money aside. It’s still limited, but the company plans to add more features.
Your MasterCard works like any other challenger bank. Every time you use it, you receive a push notification. You can set payment and withdrawal limits, lock your card if you lose it and reset your PIN code. N26 will also bring Black and Metal plans to the U.K.
How does it compare to Revolut?
Let’s be honest, the elephant in the room is Revolut . The company has hundreds of thousands (if not over a million) customers in the U.K. N26 lets you do many of the things you can already do with your Revolut account.
So let me point out a few differences. As I noted, N26 has a banking license and U.K. banking information. N26 cards work in Apple Pay and Google Pay.
When it comes to international payments, N26 lets you pay with your card anywhere in the world without any additional fee. The company uses MasterCard’s conversion rates. Revolut first converts the money with its forex feature and then lets you spend your money.
There are an infinite number of forum posts about the exchange rates you’ll get. Sometimes Revolut is cheaper, sometimes N26 is cheaper. It mostly depends on the day of the week (Revolut conversion rates are more expensive on the weekend) and the currency. Unless you plan to spend tens of thousands of GBP during your vacation, you won’t see a huge difference on your bank statement.
Revolut also has many more features than N26. You can insure your phone, buy bitcoins, buy travel insurance, create virtual cards and more. It’s clear that N26 and Revolut have two different styles.
Revolut has a bigger user base than N26. But it’s always been a bit hard to compare them, as N26 wasn’t available in the U.K. Of course, they will both say there are tens of millions of people relying on old banks — multiple challenger banks can grow at the same time if they capture market share from those aging players. Still, the battle between N26 and Revolut is on.
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Paysend announces global account to compete with Revolut
Meet Paysend’s global account, a new way to hold, spend and send money in multiple currencies using a mobile app and a card. It looks a lot like Revolut’s basic features. But the company is trying to provide a more focused and robust experience from day one.
“We are quite different from both a technical infrastructure and consumer offering viewpoint. We own and control our own processing and this gives tremendous ability and flexibility to deliver a wide variety of services whilst controlling the entire consumer journey,” Head of Product Alex Murashko told me.
“But for me an important distinction is that we have a different approach to designing the product. We believe in simplifying the consumer experience so that instead of feeling like they are bombarded with a long list of features they have available a focused group of benefits.”
And it’s true that Revolut has launched so many different features that it’s hard to keep track of what you can do with your Revolut account. For instance, you can insure your mobile phone, save money using vaults, buy cryptocurrencies, subscribe to a travel insurance package and more.
So Paysend went back to the drawing board to focus on the essential. The company lets you top up and hold money in EUR, GBP, USD, Russian rubles and Kazakhstani tenge. Paysend is partnering with Bitstamp so that you can buy and hold cryptocurrencies in the app as well.
You can then covert your money into any of those currencies at interbank exchange rates with a 1 percent markup. Revolut adds between 0.5 percent and 2 percent markup depending on the currency.
What if you’re traveling to another country? You can use your Paysend card to spend money and withdraw cash in 125 currencies. You decide in the app the backup currency that you want the company to use.
When it comes to sending money, you can send money for free to other Paysend user, or send money instantly for €1 or £1.5. The company doesn’t initiate regular bank transfers. Paysend has worked on card-to-card transactions instead. You enter the card number of your friends and family members to send money to their card directly.
Sometimes, you need to send money to someone you don’t know that well. You don’t have to ask them for their card number. You can generate a payment link and send the link. The recipient can then enter their own card number to receive the payment.
This card-to-card transfer feature has already been live for a while as a standalone product. Going forward, global accounts will become the flagship product, but standalone transfers will remain available.
Paysend has already raised $20 million and there are 130 people working for the company. Global accounts are still in beta and should roll out to European users soon.
While Paysend is still a young and intriguing product, it’s going to be interesting to see how it evolves. In addition to card-to-card transfers, the company will differentiate its product from its competitors even further over time.
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Revolut introduces a metal card
Fintech startup Revolut is launching a new premium card. As the name suggests, subscribing to Revolut Metal gives you a metal card as well as additional perks compared to Revolut Premium.
In addition to the new card and existing premium benefits, you can claim cash back on all spending in the currency of your choice. It can be EUR, USD, BTC or ETH, as Revolut supports fiat currencies and a handful of cryptocurrencies.
Don’t expect to break the bank, as you’ll only receive 0.1 percent in Europe. In other words, when you spend €1,000, you’ll receive €1. But if you often travel outside of Europe, it could be a good deal, as you’ll receive 1 percent in cash back outside of Europe.
Every time you use your Revolut card, the company gets a fraction of the card processing fee from MasterCard or Visa. Card processing fees are much lower in Europe, that’s why Revolut can’t give you back more money in Europe.
Revolut Metal customers also get a higher ATM limit and can withdraw up to €600/£600 without any fee. Premium users can only withdraw up to €400/£400 for free as a comparison. Finally, you can access a concierge service to book hotels, flights or restaurants if you’re a Metal subscriber.
Revolut Metal costs €13.99 per month or €135 per year (£12.99 per month or £120 per year). The basic premium subscription costs €7.99 per month or €82 per year (£6.99 per month or £70 per year). You’ll need to pay many, many things with your Metal card to cover the price difference.
So it’s clear that Revolut is targeting people who want to look cool with a metal card. It has a brushed metal look, a tiny Revolut logo in the top right corner and your name in the bottom left corner. It works with contactless card readers.
Revolut is following N26’s path and becomes the second challenger bank that offers a metal card. But the two companies have a different approach. Revolut’s card is slightly cheaper, and N26 focuses on partner offerings from WeWork, Hotels.com or Drivy.
Revolut sent an email yesterday saying that Metal is currently limited to existing Premium subscribers. The company only has 10,000 cards for now, so it could take a bit of time before you get your card.
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