00:00:05 · Adam
[00:00:05] S0: Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Connect, where we spend time with the operators who are rewriting the rules of financial services. Today, we have a very special edition and a very special guest who's on an ambitious quest to change the way that we think about what a bank can do for us. We're sitting down with Vlad, the CTO of Global Challenger Bank Revolut in their London office, with myself, Adam from the Flinx product team, and Fred, one of the Flinx cofounders. For those of you who don't know Revolut yet, here are a few numbers to help you set the stage. They were founded in 2015, and they've grown to well over 6,000,000 registered users with a massive amount of those using the card on a regular basis. They've grown at an eye popping rate and are acquiring customers left, right, and center. Right now, they're looking at well over 12,000 daily sign ups and are processing billions of dollars in monthly transaction volume. They're expanding around the world and are now active in 32 markets, probably more than that by now. And it's fueled by a few key principles, which Vlad will discuss with us today. This conversation was so extensive that we've decided to break it down into two parts. In this first episode, we're talking with Vlad about Revolut's ideas on market expansion and what he uses to grow around the world. Vlad, I thought it'd be great if you could just take a couple seconds to help us understand, like, what's the mission that Revolut's on. We're sitting in your office here. What's everyone working on? What do you guys try to do?
00:01:36 · Vlad Yatsenko, Adam, Fred
[00:01:36] S1: Sure. The mission I I said in terms of numbers, you probably checked that some time ago. Please update us. [00:01:44] S0: This morning, actually, I checked. [00:01:46] S1: So So this morning, seriously. [00:01:47] S0: Oh, maybe I left it up at the wrong source. [00:01:48] S1: It might be... Yeah. Yeah. It's not... Every article has a date on it. So in terms of growth, 12,000 was staggering now. For the last month we onboarded close to 30,000 customers a day. [00:02:04] S2: More than
00:02:04 · Fred, Vlad Yatsenko
[00:02:04] S2: More than [00:02:04] S1: twice to maintain pace. And then in terms of markets at least, yeah, if you want that, I guess. At the moment, our strategy is growth in global expansion, which is aligned with our general mission to create the first global financial platform for individual and businesses. As I mentioned, these two things, growth and expansionally define what pretty much every team does. It doesn't mean that everyone just focuses on customer acquisition, but what happens after you acquire a customer? All the complexity related to operating in many markets with different regulation of different understanding of the product, maybe sometimes our product is not maybe the simplest one. We're not offering just one thing. We're not solving just one problem, but solving multiple problems in more complex way. So there's a lot of challenges involved in this, but our mission is to create the global financial platform where you don't think about all this old type of money problem, especially in the global connected world where it's so easy to, today you live in one country, tomorrow in another, and there are still issues with currencies, trying to understand how to convert currencies, is the best trades, etcetera. So we're gonna, think in Europe we solved quite a lot of this for quite a lot of customers, this problem. But outside of currency exchange itself, there's a lot of other connected issues. That's why we're more into daily use and choosing other banking services.
00:03:54 · Adam, Vlad Yatsenko, Fred
[00:03:54] S0: Yeah. But even if the numbers I looked at were off, the one that like really shocked me was not like the total number of users. There's a lot of companies that focus on growth over everything. Right. And they have these crazy numbers on number of users. But it's number of like daily active or monthly active that was shocking to me because that's the challenge. Right? Like, if people are acquiring your product but not actually touching it, it's like it's a great kind of vanity stat, but it's not actually useful. Like the one that's really cool is actually seeing that like a material portion of those users are actually using it. [00:04:24] S1: Who is a Revolut user? The question we asked a lot when we were just starting before we launched and we were going through some acceleration programs for startups. And there was always this question, who is your customer? Can you define your customer? And at the time our product was defined in very simple terms. With Revolut, you can exchange, send and spend money anywhere for free. That was it. And I was like, whoever needs to do this is our customer or How any of relevant [00:04:57] S2: are these three things to your current offering today?
00:04:57 · Fred, Vlad Yatsenko, Adam
[00:04:57] S2: are these three things to your current offering today? [00:05:00] S1: They're still very relevant. They're still in the in the COVID It has to... Even when we add additional services, the cross currency element cross border is part of it. As as an example, we recently launched free stock trading. The first stocks we added US stocks, offered to European customers. Nice. Where before like you are in Europe, in The UK, just nominal fee you pay per trade is quite high. It's on average 10 plus pounds per trade. And then if it's foreign exchange, then just converting from your local currency to the currency of the stock when you sell this conversion back, you... Like this this affects risk, and then and then they charge you several percent fee on that. [00:05:51] S0: Especially if you're taking a, like, fairly small position in something. Like, if if I wanna buy, [00:05:54] S1: like Yeah. [00:05:55] S0: $200 worth of Facebook or, like, a thousand dollars worth of Google stock, like, you can get wrecked on. [00:05:59] S1: Yeah. It's like 10 plus percent you lose easily straight away just on the fees. So we eliminated this completely. It's like you can exchange at any convenient points you like, not fee, buy not fee, sell into the currency, decide when to exchange another currency, maybe you want to keep it and reinvest maybe again in dollars or we'll be adding other markets at some point as well. This is the element that makes all of this in line with our global vision, connecting different markets into one platform.
00:05:59 · Vlad Yatsenko, Fred
[00:05:59] S1: Yeah. It's like 10 plus percent you lose easily straight away just on the fees. So we eliminated this completely. It's like you can exchange at any convenient points you like, not fee, buy not fee, sell into the currency, decide when to exchange another currency, maybe you want to keep it and reinvest maybe again in dollars or we'll be adding other markets at some point as well. This is the element that makes all of this in line with our global vision, connecting different markets into one platform. [00:06:36] S2: So earlier when we were having lunch, you asked what was Flink's purpose? It's a great question it seems that it's something that probably occupies your mind even for your own business quite a lot. [00:06:46] S1: Looking forward like a couple of years in the future what does the Revolut purpose brings your platform and your abilities and features? What does that look like if a couple of years in the future in terms of being that global bank? A good example before Uber, what was your taxi experience, right? You probably were used to your local company or local similar service. [00:07:11] S2: As little as possible was the experience that I was looking for personally.