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Comment by Peroni | Hacker News Reader

Considering both senior politicians in Lithuania and Luxembourg have raised formal concerns about Revolut's bid for a bank licence, specifically because of the CEO's alleged Kremlin ties, I'm willing to assume there's some substance to that concern.

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Them not having the license also means that the deposits aren't insured the way they normally are in EU, meaning you get nothing if things go wrong.

We use Revolut around the office to split bills for lunches, etc, but I wouldn't keep more than few bucks in there.

edit: They have a banking license but current account customers now still get an e-money account only - quite confusing state. With an e-money account, the client money is supposed to be in a separate account and if they go under, you still get your money. (FCA regulates all this)

They have a banking license from Lithuania (but customers are not switched to it) which might be revoked by Lithuania and they are trying for another license in Ireland.

Thanks to comment below - edited this make more sense.

Revolut received its banking license from Lithuania in December 2018, but hasn't switched its customers over yet. After the family connection with Gazprom became public, Lithuania started considering revoking the license, and Revolut applied for another one in Ireland. It's not clear now, when and which banking license Revolut will start using. It's worth pointing out, though, that Revolut already has more customers than there are tax payers in Lithuania[1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/dec/22/lithuania-icel...

thanks, you are right, I have edited my original response (which itself is quite confusing now) - the Revolut state of regulation quiet confusing - better to stick with Monzo in UK/N26 in EU.

As an Irish person who watched the crapshoot of our banking regulation in 2000s I can assure you that this does not fill me with confidence.

Revolut seems overkill for that, maybe try Splitwise?

Venmo seems to be the standard here in the US. Is it not as common overseas?

lol no it assumes a US account. it's not even listed in the app stores here. people mostly use bank transfers for everything since it's free and fast

Haha, yeah, US banking is pretty awful in terms of ease-of-use.

I don't use Venmo myself - I'm at a point where I'd rather just pick up the check that try to split it (using any method). And let me friends pick up the next meal.

I tend to find that Venmo is a bit redundant in the UK - feature-wise, I'm not sure that it does anything that the standard bank mobile apps can't do? (There's a standard person-to-person via mobile number payments system that most banks support & integrate into their apps (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paym)).

That's nice. I wish US banks would do something like that, so we don't have to rely on 3rd party apps. But, they couldn't even roll out chip & PIN properly.

There’s a YC company called Ysplit which solves this exact problem. I highly recommend it. ysplit.com

They have a UK bank license now, so deposits are covered up to EUR 100k

They're only covered against bankruptcy though - if someone steals your phone and drains your account, you're SOL.

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