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Comment by klausjensen | Hacker News Reader

Revolut closed my business account with them and would not give me any reason why (all documentation was OK, all my clients are lilly-white busineses).

It is not clear to me if they would not tell me because they're not allowed to by law - or "just because".

Anyway - then the remaining balance on my account - they simply sent that back to the last payment that had been made => They sent my remaining balance to one of my clients!

Great API, great interface, great app, great prices - but I do not trust them any more, obviously.

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As others have mentioned these are money laundering laws. But some of them are a bit open to interpretation and from what I've seen personally Revoluts interpretation is pretty broad depending on whether they like you or not.

The problem with Revolut that cannot be compared to other banks is that you will NEVER be able to speak to anyone that isn't a mindless support chat drone. This is really where the big difference is. The APP may be miles ahead of wells fargos or capital one and even N26 which in theory also has mainly chat based support etc. but if something goes wrong there there are channels to go. Here's it's just a huge black hole.

The only way I would ever recommend Revolut to anyone is to attach it to your own credit card and fill it on demand when you travel. I only ever fill the amount I want right now because the last time I transferred money to my account the account got flagged and I had an absolutely horrible experience with a bunch of conflicting statements from mindless drones that kept trying to trick me into giving them way more information than any bank in any country I've ever used ever has.

> The problem with Revolut that cannot be compared to other banks is that you will NEVER be able to speak to anyone that isn't a mindless support chat drone.

I know quite a few people who were the target of Revolut's Source of Funds check (I believe the deposit limit when it first launched here in Singapore was an absurd $5,000 SGD, or approximately $3,500 USD) — what has happened is that the chat system would be unresponsive for weeks, because all "chats"/tickets would be routed to Revolut's understaffed compliance department without even notifying the user.

> The only way I would ever recommend Revolut to anyone is to attach it to your own credit card and fill it on demand when you travel.

I would recommend this too, except I don't dare to use it as my primary travel card as I might suddenly hit some undisclosed limit and get my account frozen while I'm travelling.

When I opened my Revolut account I took advantage of their referral scheme. I would get €15 for every customer I referred to them and who used their debit card. The new customers would also get €15. I got five people to sign up, the max.

We never saw the money. When I raised the issue over chat they told me that all my referrals took too long to setup their account and make the first payments. They wouldn't tell me what the time limits was though. Every referral made their first payment within 30 days, so that doesn't seem too long for such an offer if you ask me.

At this point I was using it as my primary account so it wasn't like I was just signing up to get referral bonuses.

This experience made me think they weren't as trustworthy as they claimed to be.

The fact that they'd nickel and dime you over a measly 75 EUR is worrying. Customer acquisition for this kind of product should cost far, far more.

You're thinking too small: if they nickel and dime a million people that becomes 75mm EUR. How many people are going to cause a big enough stink over 75 EUR though individually? Not really anyone, so they could get away with it - maybe if enough people posted similar stories then it would gain interest from enforcement agencies.

That's still a million customers who went through the friction of setting up a new bank account, and whose first impressions are now net negative.

They sometimes refer to their referral bonus system as a game or challenge, that says it all really.

https://www.icpa.org.uk/portal/money_laundering/tipping_off

In my experience at UK banks (trying to avoid embarrassing anyone by name here) what you're obligated to submit a SAR for is pretty broad and once you've SAR'd someone you almost always close their account with no reason given. So this experience will be reasonably common at every bank that does business in the UK

Randomly closing accounts with no explanation or recourse unfortunately seems to happen with basically every bank or payment provider these days

Transferring your entire balance to an arbitrary account though....yikes

> Randomly closing accounts with no explanation or recourse unfortunately seems to happen with basically every bank or payment provider these days

I suspect aggressive anti money laundering measures getting a few false positives to be the context.

Very likely true.

Fact: the regulations forbid telling the customer that they are being investigated for AML violations. Because absence of signal is itself a signal, the banks are highly incentivised to keep all kinds of communications and explanations to a minimum.

That’s incredible, did you manage to recover the balance?

Yes, I did - from the client, which I fortunately had (and still have) a good relationship with.

Revolut support could not see what the problems was and refused to help.

Glad to hear it. That's such an amazingly weird behaviour though, just fire off the balance to the account of the last payment in. I just can't imagine being a developer writing that code or being a customer service agent and executing that payment

That seems very strange. Because they are licensed by the UK FCA under the "emoney regulations" I think you should be able to take the case to the financial services ombudsman if you are a UK client, have made a complaint and they haven't resolved it to your satisfaction. Most other European countries would have a similar setup.

Don't they have a Latvian? banking license these days?

Lithuanian, yes, AFAIK.

To be fair, big banks like HSBC and Barclays also do this. Plenty of horror stories around. There needs to be a law so they could at least notify people a month or two beforehand and provide a reason...

I believe there is a law allowing them not to provide any reason.

Rather, there is no law that forces them to give a reason.

It's like any business relationship: One party may decide to terminate the relation as long as they respect the contract. They don't have to provide a reason (why would they?)

That said, usually contracts state a minimum notice period.

*requiring

On the odd occasion I've had an issue with Barclays I have been able to walk into a branch and speak to a nice person who has fixed the problem on the spot.

Old style banks have their problems but this isn't one of them. I've had a revolut account that vanished overnight (thankfully there was only 1 euro in it at the time). I also have Monzo but will only use it for small everyday transactions.

Which is funny because hbsc is the go-to bank for cartels

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