A few months ago I wrote a not-so-short comparison of a few FinTech services with offerings from high street banks in the UK — and I would note again, that the comparison does not hold up in Ireland, so it’s definitely biased, but I would uphold it for good reason. I think it might be time to do a bit more dusting over it.
The first service I should get back to talk about is Revolut, which I first praised and more recently complained about. As I said in a number of previous posts, my reasons to keep using Revolut for day-to-day transactions have pretty much disappeared: my Santander credit card gives me 0.5% cashback on all transactions, and no foreign transaction fee, why would I use Revolut? Virtual cards, and rotating-number cards are interesting and have their use, but honestly, I can’t be bothered unless it’s for very shady operations where I don’t trust giving my credit card, but those are pretty much corner cases.
Revolut has been running multiple advertising campaign throughout the London Tube, the most recent one promising three Tube trips free if you pay with Revolut. I could probably do that, next week, maybe, if I paid enough attention — I don’t use monthly tickets, so I can change card any Monday as long as I use it until the same until Sunday to cover the 7-day cap. But I had bad history with using Revolut on the TfL network before, although admittedly that was when I was landing from Dublin, and the location-based security tripped.
Update 2019-10-07: turns out I cannot actually use their TfL offer because it relies on Google Pay (which with Revolut I found already too unreliable to use for commuting) and only works if you have a Visa-issued card. My card is MasterCard-issued still.
If you check the news, the FT reported just this week how Revolut expects to reach “viability” despite continuing to lose money. This is likely because, as I pointed in my complain-post, Revolut makes perfect sense as long as you’re not paying anything for it. The only reason to sign up for any Premium or Metal tier in London (where most of their advertising budget appears to be spent, from what I read from news) is if you don’t understand the services available from the high street, or if you want to subsidize the free tier for everyone else. Funnily enough, FT Alphaville reported on the same day of the staff cashing it in.
I had to use Revolut only once in the past few months, and that was a couple of days ago. My sister asked me if I could send her some money for her to use the card, as her debit cards expired and she was trying to buy something — remember Italy does not have “faster payments” so inter-bank transfers are not instantaneous. It should be a simple operation: top-up £50, send £50 to my sister, she can convert to € and spend it.
Topping up worked like a charm. But sending the money didn’t: in addition to confirming my fingerprint, the app said it would send me an email, and to check the email from the same device to confirm the operation. The email can be re-sent only after one minute, but (as often) it recommends you to check your Junk or Spam folder too. The email never arrived. I don’t mean within a minute. I mean that this is two days later, the email has still not arrived yet.
No the mail server was not having a hiccup. Yes I did try resending it five minutes later. Yes I did check the Spam folder. No it’s not graylisting. My email address is served by G Suite, which means it’s more reliable than a normal Gmail address. Revolut can’t seem to be able to send email to Gmail. And it’s not just me. The same problem with email not arriving happened a number of months ago to my girlfriend, while sending money to my Revolut account! Anyway the answer is that I now have £50 that I can’t seem to be able to send to my sister, she ended up asking our mum for the transfer instead, and I have even less trust in the service.
I complained on Twitter about this, but without tagging in the Revolut account. When this happened to my girlfriend, and I ranted at them about it, they kept insisting to “check [my] spam folder”, which of course we did. If I asked now, I’m expecting to hear that “PSD2 made them do it”.
It’s sad, but I can’t really expect much better from a service that, despite a lot of nice ideas at the start, appear to have found a business model only to augment banks in places where high street has no offering (Ireland), or for people who can’t seem to know better (the whole Bitcoin/cryptocurrency part, that appears to be the sole attraction for Premium/Metal for quite a few people).
