Revolut wants to play in the big leagues in France and aims to compete with large online and traditional banks such as Boursorama or Crédit Agricole. In this sense, it announces the imminent arrival of consumer credit, the first step in the aim of getting rid of its stubborn reputation as a neobank.
It was during a Paris conference which we were able to attend that Revolut unveiled its ambitions for the next two years, shared some figures as well as the few features to come, all through Antoine le Nel, manager growth at Revolut France:
We want to be the number one bank for our customers […] We are aiming for 100 million customers by 2025.
To model itself on the so-called traditional banking models, Revolut is betting on as many banking products as possible. In this context, the bank announces the arrival on May 30 of consumer loans accessible to all customers in just a few steps, without opening costs and with reduced delays thanks to the Open Banking system.
This loan program ranges from 1,000 to 50,000 euros with durations ranging from 3 and 84 months on rates of 3.9 to 21.12%. The bank has not yet announced a mortgage loan, however Antoine le Nel assured us that it was in the future development plans.
Say no more neobanks, Revolut is targeting online banks and more
Bunq, N26 or even Lydia are already far behind, Revolut is now targeting online banking giants like Boursorama and its more than 5 million users or even Crédit Agricole, the leading bank in France in terms of customers (22 million).
Neobanks are no longer our natural competitors
It must be said that the development of Revolut can impress. In just three years, the customer base has almost tripled since 2019, reaching around 30 million worldwide, including nearly 2.5 million in France alone, Revolut being currently available in 31 countries. Figures that titillate the largest online banks such as Fortuneo and Boursorama that the bank of British origin cheerfully apes.
Other French figures support these facts, first in the FinTech sector where Revolut ranks second in number of downloads in April 2023 – just behind a certain PayPal – in addition to being the second banking application the most downloaded over this same period.
During this presentation and in a climate not conducive to the profitability of banks, Revolut also wanted to share its good financial health by claiming to have achieved revenues of 850 million pounds sterling in 2022 (+ 34% compared to 2021) with a profit of 26.3 million while it recorded a loss of 224 million last year.
Revolut Business, launched last year, is also an important vector for the bank which wishes to impose itself on the professional market with an offer adapted to the self-employed. Note that even if Qonto is still widely acclaimed in France in this sector, Revolut Business has made a great breakthrough internationally, slightly exceeding the number of international downloads in April.
Its strategy to transform its banking application into a “ super app is also one of the levers for creating ever more acquisitions following the model of Chinese applications such as WeChat or Alipay.
The goal is to ensure that the application brings together a constellation of ultra- and extra-banking services such as booking hotels and vacation homes, cashback or the various investment programs in cryptocurrencies, ETH and commodities.
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