Revolut CFO resigns following money laundering controversy
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EDIT: found it: https://www.revolut.com/help/profile/i-want-to-terminate-my-...
EDIT2: What a shit show, I have been trying to delete my account for more than 30 minutes now. When you chat through the app you are first connected to a bot which you need to tell you want to talk to a human, after waiting a while you finally get a human which then tells you to authenticate your self by signing into the app!? So thinking something must be borked with the app I close it and go back in only to find out I am back at the end of the queue for support chat which is now "experiencing high volumes"...
EDIT3: I still have an account :( the wait is 1 hour now... I can't find any emails address to send me account termination to. WTF
EDIT4: Still trying to find where to send my termination email or GDPR complaint (where do I find who the data protection officer is?). I Found that the address listed on their website is not the same as the one in the UK company registry: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/08804411
EDIT5: Crunchbase has "support@revolut.com" listed so I will give that a try.
EDIT6: "Your message wasn't delivered to support@revolut.com because the address couldn't be found, or is unable to receive mail." :(
any company with roots/ties in the cryptocurrency scene is waving a giant red flag to users, as confirmed by the latest money laundering mess revolut is going through
No it isn't, the money is just held in a Lloyds or Barclays account. Revolut are not a fully-regulated bank, they're an Electronic Money Institution. The same as TransferWise. If you trust Revolut, you're also trusting a middleman.
[1] https://blog.revolut.com/how-emoney-companies-are-growing-up...
[2] https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/electronic-money-payment-instit...
Sounds great, and I hope TransferWise go down that route one day too. But it still doesn't mean your Revolut account is the same as a Lloyds one.
i use transferwise for converting money quickly at the market rate plus a small markup rather than the higher fees and longer wait times to wire money across "real" bank accounts, the same thing you can do with revolut. i don't want or need either to replace lloyds, chase, barclays, BOA, etc.
You probably have never used Monzo or Revolut then XD or perhaps you work for one of these banks. Hilarious comment though.
I am actually using both and I am pretty happy with them, mainly because of their FX rates and stylish colours. On the other hand though, I would never send my salary there and I don't trust that they are not selling my data or that they have the magnitude of security processes Santander or Barclays have in place.
It has its benefits, but travelling around the world currently doesn't seem like one.
I have learned on my own skin that travelling with a single card is not a good idea. I always have two (plus some hard cash just in case). But Revolut has became my first choice to pay abroad because it charges no commission when paying with foreign currency (I suppose they make some money by tweaking exchange rates, but so do normal banks, and I have checked in practice that Revolut is much cheaper). So even if it's not perfect, I would say travelling around is and advantage.
By the way, what I don't understand about Revolut is why they never charged me the tips I paid when I was in New Orleans last summer... they had this weird tipping system at restaurants where you would first pay the raw prices, and then you would write the tip manually on a piece of paper and they were supposed to charge it later on, except they never did.
I really don't want to deal with my bank if by some chance amount Y is not what I wanted.
From my (European) point-of-view this seems completely ridiculous, since here I see the actual amount before I have to swipe/insert the card into the device.
However, I completely agree with you that it's not fair to the restaurant/workers if they don't actually get the tip.
Not that I like tipping systems at all, I find them an unnecessary hassle for the customer and detrimental to workers' rights, but if you have to have it I found the system in Canada (at least in Vancouver) much saner: you could key the tip amount into the POS machine when you pay, or directly select a tip percentage and the machine would add the tip for you. Compared to that, having to actually calculate the amount by hand and write it with a pen in the restaurants in New Orleans, blindly trusting that they would eventually charge that amount, looked like... last century.
Checked Monzo again, they have this in american transactions:
> Restaurants in the USA
> Restaurants in the USA are a bit of a special case. The waiter runs your card for the meal's amount and then, after youtip, they cancel the first transaction and charge you again for the meal plus your generous tip.
> REAL TIME
> The problem is that, until the first transaction reverses (10 days later) we don't have a way to tell that the restaurant charged you once or twice.
> Legacy banks will block the initial transaction amount in your account and release it 10 days later, but only the amount + tip will appear in your statement :)
_edit_ I didn't mean to imply that this was _unique_ to only Monzo and Revolut worldwide. But it is unusual in the UK - it is it is something that regular UK Big banks don't do, or are rushing to catch up with now.
I get the iOS notification instantly when I pay for something with the card, whether in person or online.
Is this something more? (I'm a potential adopter if so)
1) good fx rate, I think it's google exchange rate with no fees for converting from/to various currencies
2) really easy transactions between friends (makes it really easy to settle up our holiday bills, could have an integration with Splitwise...)
3) almost instant feedback in the app about purchases
4) really nice analytics
5) virtual (unlimited?) cards, each with their own limit: I have a virtual card for my online purchases and my physical card has online purchases disabled
6) despite what others said, I've found the customer support to be all right
7) traveling insurance
8) (don't remember the exact amount) cheap-ish device insurance (eg for my phone)
9) metal card (as in, not a piece of plastic)
10) accounts in a shitload of currencies (used gbp, euro and usd so far)
11) contactless (but well, all cards seem to be like that)
12) (not using this) one can buy crypto coins via the app
Edit: It seems the functionality is there, but it doesn't work for Contactless, which is the majority of transactions I've done.
Try TransferWise borderless.
edit: my bad, seems like I'm confused with something else but can't figure out what!
Probably N26[1], who use TransferWise for in-app currency exchanges[2][3].
[1] https://www.n26.com/ [2] https://transferwise.com/help/article/2340141/euro-transfers... [3] https://n26.com/en-eu/transferwise
I am interested in what you mean by "free" - I think you mean that they charge no fee for the currency conversion but what about the conversion rate ? Are you suggesting they give you the current, spot rate with no basis points charged at all ?
In the Revolut app, I can convert, for example, EUR>USD>EUR (on a weekday; they tack on an additional 0.5% or so on weekends) and maybe lose a cent in the process.
If not, what is it that Revolut has done according to this article that makes you want to quit?
Once they stop buying market share, this attitude toward others is likely to apply to their customers as well.
They say all money is parked in a trust account at a regular bank in Lithuania. But I wouldn't want to be involved in testing how well that setup hold up in court.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/dec/22/lithuania-icel...
Their in-app chat support agents take ages to respond and are either robots, or they act like they're robots. They know very few things, and will never let you speak to someone who can actually help you. They intentionally hide their email addresses, their "chat agents" always refuse to give you an email and you won't find an email address on their website either. I also tried support@revolut.com and also info@, hello@ and others.
I once had to write a PHYSICAL LETTER that I sent via post to complain. They immediately responded via email (and complied with my requests) from the following address. Feel free to use it to complain:
formalcomplaints@revolut.com
Deleting my account now as well
Call to action: when a company promises something, the pitch appears good enough and bad enough to be true, sign up, then immediately cancel the service to see if its possible and what the hurdles are. For each additional service you enable with the company, iterate on the cancellation process. If at any point you find that the cancellation process becomes 'too much', you can evaluate whether the value provided by the company exceeds its inability to cancel or provide refunds.
Ability to cancel a service should be a function of the service, no?
9th Floor 107 Cheapside, London, United Kingdom, EC2V 6DN
"Cheapside", indeed!
I'm a premium/black card client, and will be removing my money right away and closing my account. Their behavior is just so hypocrite
With respect to the CFO, My uninformed guess is that he originally argued for compliance, but was bullied into “playing along” with the growth at ALL costs mantra.
They have already been revealed as a company that flouts employment law and every standard of decency. If you find my attitude towards such an enterprise "sad," well, carry on with that as well.
I am not here to cheer for the amoral "It doesn't matter how we get there, as long as the result looks good according to the metrics people use to decide whether to give us money."
Who said anything about employment law or decency? They simply have nothing in common with a pharmaceutical company that committed fraud and delivered fake medical reports to patients or a festival that scammed hundreds of people out of their money... If anything they could be compared to Uber. We can hate them for how they treat their employees or how they break some laws but they will not end up like Theranos or Fyre festival.
But some laws definitely exist to perpetuate crony capitalism. See the rules that make it nearly impossible to start a new bank in Canada.
And some laws exist to protect consumers from entrepreneurs that move fast and break the lives of people who trust them. See the history of banking before there were laws restricting banks. Note that these are the same laws, performing different purposes at different times.
This touches on Chesterton's Fence: It might be a good idea to remove a lot of the regulation around banking in Canada, but not without understanding all of the problems that those laws were designed to fix, and making sure that whatever replaces those laws serves the same purpose.
All-too-often, we hear "We no longer need that protection, circumstances have changed." This is often naïve, as the reason circumstances have changed is the presence of those outdated laws. Remove them, and we revert back to the circumstances that led us to create the laws in the first place.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scan...
Edit: For anyone wondering this is the Slack screenshot about KPIs https://twitter.com/phillipcaudell/status/110108122935141580...
Perhaps I should check the wait list count again to see if they have had a swathe of cancellations lately? Then again, I am half convinced this is just a made up wait counter to increase the FOMO factor.
EDIT: I am actually #9750 on the wait list, and can bump myself up 6610 places with a referral. About the same as 9 months ago.
If you are after this sort of thing, have a look at Up
I'm guessing that their waitlist is nothing more than a low-effort MVP to convince a regulatory body that the residents of a country want their service there.
In fact Starling has been so good that I've largely left my existing bank for them.
Seems to be UK only :/
It is a common mis-conception to assume Revolut and Starling are the same. Revolut and Monzo probably have more in common i.e. they both started out getting crowdfunded as pre-paid cards. Monzo acquired a banking licence and migrated their customers over to their banking product. Revolut only acquired the licence, at the end of last year [1]. It has yet to offer a banking product.
Starling was built from the ground up as a challenger bank.
https://monzo.com/blog/2018/06/07/is-monzo-a-bank/
Revolut has been licensed in Lithuania in December 2018:
https://blog.revolut.com/we-got-a-banking-licence/
Big difference :)
Disclaimer: I work for Monzo.
Additionally they still have no accounts where I am resulting in IBAN fees.
In contrast transferwise may not support "crypto" (Revolut doesn't let you send out or in crypto making it more or less useless) but they are not trying to up sell you and they do have accounts in my country allowing for fast transfers. They don't have fancy metal cards but they have been expanding their services instead.
I have one, and aside from how it's practically useless because I can't top up fiat into it (I currently have to do SGD>EUR>BTC>SGD just to use the card), it's also heavy.
Maybe I'm just the type of customer that they're not targeting.
Do you have a link for that?
Maybe they should have notified the regulator. But knowing how he drives his staff I reluctantly understand where he's coming from.
"I hope your KPI isn't tied to effectively running the company because I'd say your performance rating is "significantly below expectations" and we both know what that means."
Oof.
- three months of being pushed to lend lots, regardless of what the nonexistent risk models say, while not being allowed to set up a Collections team with real people
- three months of watching helplessly as a wave of bad accounts roll through the delinquency buckets to writeoff
- fired
No thanks...
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-trade-unions-labour-...
They are high quality potatoes.
You want some?
One for two - special price for you!
They keep mentioning that they will launch for citizens of non-EU countries but I've yet to see it happen. Does anyone know more about this?
HSBC in Mexico, for example: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-18880269
From my reading there was no evidence of any money laundering having taken place. But yes money laundering has habitually happened in the traditional banking system. Personally I think the banks get a lot more flack than is warranted. There have been some really obvious cases but criminals are generally are usually one step ahead of any measures prevention measures. And as a retail client provided I'm not losing my money I don't mind what other clients they have on their books. If regulators do than they're free to punish any offending banks as they see fit.
You loose time if you accidentally trip one of their anti laundering wires. And we all know time is money.
Facts: CEO's father is a deputy director Gazprom, and one of the investors is Yuri Milner, who the paradise papers outed for channeling Kremlin cash in to tech co's.
Or even worse: sometimes that doesn't happen at all.
Whatever the causes might be, one big effect is that HR usually gets to spin stories about turnover and recruiting to create perceptions such as
- nobody could possibly have done anything to prevent a critical employee from leaving
- despite some critical person leaving, nobody did anything wrong and if they hired the same person again they should handle everything the same way.
- there are just not enough candidates (to disguise the real issue that compensation and benefits are not competitive)
- the employee we need has to be open-minded, but we’re only seeing dogmatic people in the pipeline and/or the ubiquitous “not a good culture fit” feedback, to disguise the problem that the company itself is dogmatic and closed-minded, and candidates react to perceived dogmatic culture by turning down interviews or offers.
And many more.
In other words, HR will spin the situation to say that no productivity is lost to turnover, that nothing could have been done to maintain that productivity, and that whatever happens is never due to misaligned compensation or management failures, it’s just an unchangeable cost of doing business.
I guess Glassdoor is as close as it gets now, together with leaks on Twitter posted by the parent.
One of the problems with Glassdoor is availability bias - it selects in the people who have been around at companies like this for a while and/or thrive in this kind of culture and selects out people who take one look at a company culture like this and leave within a week.
I also completely lost any trust that this company can safely deal with my money and private data securely.
Absolutely disgusting.
Why would you ever put up with something like this? I would laugh at the recruiter or manager if I was asked to do something like this. It’s akin to that door to door knife company that takes advantage of college kids.
There was a wired article in the twitter link you provided.
>She did a 30-minute job interview over Google Hangouts with the London-based head of business development, Andrius Biceika, and was immediately told she had passed to the next round, which would involve a small test. “The surprise came when I received the task and it asked me to get the company as many clients as possible, with each one depositing €10 into the app,” says Laura.
The instructions on the exercise said the applicants should recruit at least 200 clients in a week to have a chance at passing to the next interview phase. The task’s description didn’t guarantee that reaching the target would automatically qualify applicants for a job, but did advise them on a number of ways they could get clients, such as sharing a “promo code” with their friends, sharing it on social media, and posting promotional flyers on university campuses.
After Laura wrote back refusing to do the task and saying she was disappointed that the company would “take advantage of someone that is looking for a job”, Biceika emailed her saying she was the only candidate out of over 350 that had complained about the task. “Apologies you're not up to show what you're capable of,” he wrote in the email.
This isn't strictly true.
The Working Time Directive provides you the right to work no more than 48 hours a week.
It is possible in the UK to opt out of the Working Time Directive, but it is not mandatory. You cannot be forced to do so.
So whilst a UK company can legally add a clause that says "you agree to work overtime without any pay", they cannot force you to work that overtime unless you have agreed to opt-out. A company that doesn't hire you because you refuse to opt-out is breaking the law.
Unless the company does something bafflingly stupid, though, there's likely no way to prove that's what happened.
I'm nearly certain you are wrong on this point. A company definitely cannot fire you or mistreat you for not agreeing to the clause, but there's literally nothing in that page that you sent that would say it's illegal to not hire somebody just because they don't agree to the opt out.
It sounds like Laura showed what's she's capable of: standing up to abusive employers. It's a shame she was the only one.
For a sufficient amount of money I would do it. But it would be a LOT.
Even so, can you really claim that they are not pushed towards nearly impossible goals? It's very common to not reach a goal for a gazillion of reasons, forcing people to work weekends while you yourself get all the money from it is being an asshat.
[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-trade-unions-labour-...
Wow, disgusting.
Alas, that is behind a paywall.
ONE of the UK’s most promising financial technology start-ups has been accused of violating basic banking rules by failing to block thousands of potentially suspicious transactions on its platform.
Documents seen by The Daily Telegraph show that for three months last year Revolut switched off an automated system designed to stop dubious money transfers.
As a result, thousands of illegal transactions may have passed through the London-based start-up’s digital banking system between July and September of 2018.
Revolut launched an internal investigation in late 2018 after a whistleblower contacted Revolut’s board about serious issues with its sanctions screening system.
In a letter to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in September 2018, Revolut’s head of legal Tom Hambrett wrote: “The investigation concluded that the original decision to turn off the transaction-halting mechanism was erroneous and implied a remediable systems and controls failing.”
Sanctions screening systems automatically check customer records against an official list to identify highrisk transactions and those flagged as “politically exposed persons”.
Revolut, which has grown to over 3m customers around the world since its launch in 2015, contacted the Financial Conduct Authority in September to inform the watchdog of a three-month “failing”, The Telegraph can reveal.
It told the FCA that it had disabled part of its sanctions screening system after it made 8,000 “false positive” flags, incorrectly identifying legitimate transactions as being suspicious and blocking transfers. The company then moved to a compliance system that flagged transactions but did not automatically disable them, Revolut said.
The problems at Revolut follow a string of regulatory issues at other so-called “challenger banks”. Metro Bank was forced to announced plans to raise £350m from investors this week after revealing that it had underestimated the risk level of some of its commercial loans. Metro Bank’s shares fell a further 27pc yesterday after tumbling 16pc on Tuesday as the extent of its issues became clear.
The FCA was only informed of the problems at Revolut after an employee complained to the board about the switch and the fact it did not automatically block suspicious transactions.
The company reactivated its sanctions screening system on Sept 16, Revolut told the FCA.
Revolut told the watchdog it did not believe that it had broken the law during its switch to a different compliance system. “To the best of Revolut’s knowledge there has been no breach of law with respect to sanctions requirements,” the company wrote.
The digital bank has since introduced a new system following the incident last year, it said in the letter.
However, the incident raises questions over Revolut’s ability to stop individuals and companies who are hit by international sanctions from using its app. It follows a report by the bank to the FCA and National Crime Agency last year in which it warned both organisations of suspected money laundering through its app.
The digital bank has suffered a number of departures from its compliance team in the past two years, including two chief risk officers, the chief compliance officer, and two money laundering reporting officers.
A spokesman for the FCA declined to comment. A Revolut spokesman said: “Revolut does not comment on its engagement with its regulators.”
Yikes. This makes me think management was being less than truthful with the board. Thats a recipe for a disaster.
Kraków, PL 1 Stanisława Klimeckiego
Moskva, RU Nizhniy Susalnyy pereulok
How likely are these locations likely to cooperate to say a DOJ investigation? Especially the one in Moscow out of all places....
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland%E2%80%93United_States_r...
I recently opened a child bank account (in the UK) and the application form had one page for parents and child's details then 5 pages related to money laundering...
Edit: here we are... Send in the immature downvotes.
It's used to punish people who are working to disguise serious crimes, principally the mob.
It's not unethical behaviour. It's simple business. No-one in any business is going to ask where their customers got their money from, you just try to make customers spend their cash on you rather than a competitor.
Banks have to comply with the law, of course, but beyond that you cannot expect them to hurt their business for no reason. This "holier than thou" attitude is hypocrisy, frankly.
they must comply with the law and often they don't or they devise clever workarounds, abusing judicial loopholes, and sometimes they get caught and then sometimes some scape-goat might end up in jail for couple years.
until we see a mass execution^W^W real punishment of top management of all of large banks on this planet - nothing will change in the foreseeable future.
That is not an empirical fact. It's a specific interpretation of how things should be in the world. Some see it that way and other see it differently.
Someone claimed that it was the bank's fault because they did nothing to prevent money laundering. Why would they if they are not forced to? When you run a business you do not turn customers away, especially they they want to give you plenty of cash... It's naive or hypocritical to claim otherwise.
None is blaming them for accepting funds from anyone that they come across, but there should be no confusion as to why the rules exist: because the banks will indiscriminately allow the transfer of funds from illegitimate sources.
With that in mind, the rules are crazy, because the banks don't care.
Thankfully I got everything moved over to Lloyds and I couldn't be happier with their service.
The digital bank has suffered a number of departures from its compliance team in the past two years, including two chief risk officers, the chief compliance officer, and two money laundering reporting officers."
I don't believe the Russian CEO could be involved in, complicit in, or just turning a blind eye to, laundering, in any way whatsoever, so clearly this was just a stupid decision entirely on the part of the CFO to turn off the monitors due to their excessive chatter.
Oh, why couldn't you possibly believe this?