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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

I work for a bank. We only make money on credit cards and mortgages. The fees for regular banking stuff like accounts, cheques, etc. barely cover the expenses for operating them. And this is after decades of MBAs and executives trying to find ways to profit off of them.

Unless Revolut gets into lending (aside from the overnight market) I think there is little opportunity for them to make a profit - It’s like trying to run a bar without serving alcohol.

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I have to assume they're planning to get into lending. There's no point in being a bank otherwise.

Their banking executives are quitting. I’m assuming that’s because they’re butting heads with the tech guys who think “a bank is just a type of software company”.

I think they're quitting because the company is mismanaged by the founders and there is nothing they can do about it (it's the next Uber). See scandals about not paying their employees and recurrent fraud.

My wife used to use Revolut, had to close her account AND block all transfers from her normal bank to Revolut after repeated frauds.

Want to know how fraud works nowadays? Let's say a fraudster gets a card number somehow.

What they do next is open a revolut account under the same name as the card, then credit the account using the stolen card. It's easy because revolut has zero KYC (identity verification) and the name/address matching doesn't trigger fraud detection.

I've always assumed that they make their money through mining customer data and merging it with e.g. Facebook Pixel datasets etc, but I have no evidence for this. Just seems like the 'obvious' business model for a tech-focussed bank as I assume that traditional banks have more difficulty in adapting their systems for these kind of use cases and I don't see how they could offer so much for free based on small monthly fees from a handful of people.

That said, they're also looking more and more like they might become the Robinhood of Europe, which brings its own revenue models.

Normal banks do this too, it’s not that profitable. We mine your credit card history and form partnerships with companies that appear on a lot of people’s statements. We send you our customers, you advertise our credit cards, win-win!

Companies buy data on who buys their products if they have a wholesale/retail distribution model. Unlike DTC they don’t know who buys their stuff so they don’t know who to target.

Buying our credit card data is a big business.

I think people like yourself value “data” too much. The value of financial data is that it can be used to target financial products: if you’re a bank why would you cut in a middleman on that? Look to any financial services company trying to make money through “data” and you’ll see they have direct relationships with advertisers that integrate directly into their product through “recommendations”. This is very well established and very very profitable — see nerdwallet, CreditKarma etc.

Except their revenues are £163m, so it’s not exactly like they do not have a revenue source. I think you are too pessimistic. I don’t have a split but would imagine the largest revenue source is the interchange fee? I would also doubt very much that their cost base is very optimised at the moment, so I would think profit is very doable. In addition, having used their business offering, I think they have a huge opportunity there, their product is very good.

Europe is known to have really shitty profits from interchange fees. It’s not like North America, where these profits are a bit of a runaway train. We are currently talking about “interchange shrink” because we expect this ride to come to an end soon (aka loyalty programs are about to get really shitty, especially with the collapse of the travel industry)

For those who aren't aware, European interchange fees are regulated (In the EU, interchange fees are capped to 0.3% of the transaction for credit cards and to 0.2% for debit cards, no cap for corporate cards), which is good IMHO. Banking should be treated as a utility, lending and other services can be the profit center (as you allude to in your comments).

Margin compression is a thing for banks who haven't realized yet they're software companies that offer financial services now, and the moat continues to shrink (getting a banking license is hard, partnering with another bank in need of deposits less so). One must be willing to cannibalize margins to survive or be prepared to be left behind by those who are more efficient (and I admit that macro trends make this harder than in the past; "borrow at 3, lend at 6, at the golf course by 3" [1] is dead).

Disclosure: Part of my work is helping old banks attempt to turn into software companies, with wildly varying results depending on the org.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-6-3_Rule

> I would also doubt very much that their cost base is very optimised at the moment, so I would think profit is very doable.

I agree. Until recently they were literally paying users to open an account and recruit new customers. You could exchange up to £5000/month for free (now only £1000). And if you need to make a big single transfer, for instance while moving to a different country, paying one year of premium membership can still be cheaper than Transferwise's fee on that single transaction.

Doesn't the likes of Mastercard and Visa pay some sort of kickback?

Yes, startups can give a good run for their money to banks.

Well, with accounts, their money is going to come from the Overnight Market; The bank has to be UP money at the end of the day in order to lend money to other banks over night. If Revolut’s customers did more withdrawals throughout the day than deposits, then Revolut has to borrow money overnight and it will cost them money.

So that’s the challenge facing startup banks: have your customers do more deposits in a day than withdrawals.

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