Business
Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance. And today we continue our journey into the world of Revolut. Yes, the FinTech, the Neo bank that seems to be conquering all. And today we're going to look at the user experience from its product. Are they delighting customers?I wonder, are they serving each and every user? Are they doing it right? These are the questions we're going to ask. Now, the starting point here. Is that they do indeed provide a user experience, which is super fast, very snappy interface, easy, and boy, the features they just keep on coming. They are adding features at a prolific rate.So you and I, we're going to dive into what users actually love about the [00:01:00] Revolut product. And we're going to learn what best practices we can take out from. This banking customer experience. We're going to see what we can use when we build products to now, the first thing I want to do is set some context because the Revolut story is quite simple.When we come to product, it's just doing the basics right now. That's not particularly revolutionary or earth shattering, but in the context of banking, it most certainly is. Let me give you the proof just to compare what people really think about this product, what the customer experience is really like for Revolut.I've gotten competitor to one of the better legacy banks in the United Kingdom. Buckeye spank. And what I did is I thought, well, okay, let's go find a really large number [00:02:00] of reviews for both in the same platform. And so I went to Trustpilot very good, a customer review application, and I compared. What over 5,000 people had to say about Barclays and then over 70,000 people, what they had to say with Revolut and the numbers just don't align.Barclays can only muster our 1.5 stars out of five. So we're talking about an incredibly seasoned, traditional legacy bank. Huge incise. Yeah, customers rate it so poorly that Trustpilot has these different categories for the number of stars that you have. And Barclays with 1.5 stars out of five, they are in the bad category.[00:03:00] I mean, what a travesty that a bank of their tenure, a bank. That is so institutionalized in the United Kingdom and abroad. Yeah. They can only muster at 1.5 out of five Revolut. On the other hand, I mean, huge number of reviews, 79,000 that already tells you something 4.3 average category. Excellent. And I think I've, I've chosen two reviews that I think expose the story behind, after sifting through them all.This is what I want to share with you. Here's one. This is by a reviewer in the United Kingdom. His name is Chris packer. He gives Barclays one star out of five and his headline. Is avoid Barclays, if you can. I mean, this is when your customers go into what we call [00:04:00] detract mode. They're not neutral and they're certainly not advocates.They are detractors. They're advocating against you. He says in his review, avoid Barclays. If you can, I've had numerous problems with Barclays, including having posts sent to the wrong address, access being denied, online banking and infuriating telephone banking system. Well, I mean, sending posts doesn't sound like too, how to thing, sorting out access denials to online banking, you know, with all the passwords and security procedures, that's kind of cost of entry for any bank these days and a telephone banking system.Like, come on guys, telephone's been around a century now think we might be able to get that right. But on the other hand, Here's a review that I got from this, this person's called G fan 2015. And he says in his review of Revolut, [00:05:00] of course, Revolut is a great product, as long as you don't hit a snag. Hmm.Okay. So this is interesting. The moment you're facing issue, there is no way to resolve it quickly. And he goes on to explain some of that. So it's interesting. Isn't it? Just the difference there, even though, I mean, I deliberately chose this Revolut one, which wasn't all strawberries and cream, but what it did say is I'll take you back to this.Of course, Revolut is a great product and that's why we can learn so very, very much. What is astounding to me? The actually Barclays isn't the worst customer experience in the United Kingdom because we have done a lot of work studying the UX of banking report by Peter Ramsey, where in the UK, he studied the experience and measured the customer experience throughout the UK banking system.And barcodes actually was kind of one of the better. So I [00:06:00] really don't want to experience the worst there. So this is the context of why getting the basics is so innovative. It's so new in an existing category. So the story here is that legacy banks just get the basics wrong. It's not fast, they're not transparent about fees.And some of their basic features like hello, telephone calls. They can't get those touch points. Right. And the truth is that Revolut gets the basics, right? Super fast product, very transparent about fees, and they just continue to add more features. But if we step back, there's still so much opportunity.Whether it's for Revolut, Barclays or some other neobank or FinTech, you can see that it seems like everyone stumbles, when you have a particular what we call in the industry, like an edge case where there's some unusual characteristic that blocks our user journey. Both banks seem [00:07:00] to struggle with that.So there's the opportunity. So Revolut has got even further to grow and I think the gap for Barclays and other legacy banks becomes larger. Okay. So let's take now a snapshot and a check-in on what are the features that they actually include in their product? Well, money transfers. They seem to be the gods of, and.What's really important on the back of a transfer or a payment is that you get instant, real time notifications and analytics. It's really important that if you study the customer experience, people hate the fact that they have to sometimes reload, close their account and reopen it to get the new balance.Okay. So that's really good. Essential again. Revolut does it. Well, many others do not. And of course they've Done a great job on bill splitting. They've opened up into cryptocurrencies and they're doing this now across many markets, such as [00:08:00] Japan, India, and the U S they're really charging for some global expansion there.I'm talking about being overseas. I mean, handling currencies and transfers in different currency seems to be one of their great strengths. It's it really is exceptional when compared to the. Rest of the market. And of course there's lots of other features that help you manage your money. I want to focus on one feature in their product.I think it tells a little bit the story of Revolut and why their customer experience is so good. So the way back in April, 2018, they launched volts. Volts are a special little area that you have. It's a, it's a little envelope where you can put your savings into. And these little volts are really interesting.It's a beautifully, simple idea. It's like a, a little savings area and here's the interesting thing. The [00:09:00] saving features are personal. All four groups. So you can chip in with your friends and check this out. Since they launched it, there have been over 4.5 million volts created by users. There is 6,000 new volts created each day and into those volts, the Revolut global user base has saved over $2.5 billion.How good is this? This is a great example of not just being someone that holds onto your money. What Revolut is showing us with volts is by understanding the user and their end goals, a trip to Japan, to Mexico, maybe saving for a wedding, or just paying the bills. They will help you get it done. And this is where they can build so much trust.And imagine if they get a charter and licensed to be a [00:10:00] full fledged bank across these markets, it would be incredibly powerful because their user experience is far. Better than the industry. And that's why they've grown to over 15 million customers. And it's not only with consumers, the Aleuts product is rolling out.Those features, they're getting into the business side of things. So just. In less than the last six months, they have launched a bunch of new features. They're allowing businesses to, to run on Revolut. Of course, they've now got QR codes for socially distance payments. They've got a new expenses product they've got, and this is really interesting.Two other things I want to talk about the ultimate freelancer plants. So usually. Going from this, this kind of mass growth freemium model. This is one of the most successful models for fintechs neobanks, usually these [00:11:00] which is a complimented by a different way of thinking where you kind of go after just a local market or perhaps a segment of customers.What Revolut are doing is they have built the ultimate freelance plant, which serves. The growing number of freelances who are perhaps working from home or they're digital nomads. So they are not only going for the mass freemium model, but they're also starting to cater to particular segments such as business, such as freelances.They have even built a plugin for the very. Popular WordPress till called WooCommerce WooCommerce commerce helps you create an easy shop, do E business to retail on your WordPress website. And the reason this matters is WordPress makes up well over a quarter of all websites on the internet and built with WordPress.And so Revolut have created this gateway that enables you to use Revolut as your payments engine. [00:12:00] Really interesting stuff. So no doubt. They're innovating. I will say the one word of caution here is. That they are becoming bigger and bigger, and they're doing more things than just focusing on international money transfer.This could be their opportunity, but it could also be their greatest challenge. And coupled with the fact that they are going to have to move more customers to paid, can they sustain their growth? Can they achieve a viable business? Because they've given a lot of way to their customers and that's afforded them the growth.The real question is can they actually convert. I mean to premium. So I want to talk about some of the homework I want to give to the team at Revolut. They are definitely going to have to find a balance as they transition more of their value into their premium features. This is really, really important.They're going to have to really think about how they're going to operate, whether it's going to be as a full stack or whether it's going to be as a front [00:13:00] end bank. They are going to need a banking license and charter. If they want to have the most viable customer relationships, if they want to increase total revenue per user, they're going to need that because then they'll be able to offer the full deposit guarantee and offer a full range of credit and debit services across all currencies.And without a doubt a lot of people do complain when little snags hit. So taking you back to that review that I started at the beginning of this episode, when people get frozen out due to security reasons in their app, this seems to be a bit of a nightmare for the user. So. Homework for Revolut to do there and all in all.When we do see users having errors that go outside of the normal, we are seeing a lot of negative feedback about customer support. Sometimes the chat takes too long. Maybe the chat doesn't get answered so [00:14:00] homework to do, but wow. When we look at this product, we can see. At Revolut truly has done the basics.Right. And they have been able to grow by just doing the basics. Right? What a powerful lesson that we can take from Revolut. And I hope all of you are now with a little bit of inspiration and some practical advice on how you can build great products, too. Now talking about building great products, you can go to bottom-up dot IO and we have a ton of free courses.We have design thinking, agile lean case studies and Revolut. Lots of FinTech presentations. Get on over to bottom-up dot IO. It's all free too. Open source so you can learn to make better products. All right. That's it for the bottom upskills podcast. That's right.