How Revolut cracked their Product l The Amazon of Banking

BottomUp - Skills for Innovators

Ep. 17 How Revolut cracked their Product: the Amazon of banking

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the bottom up podcast. I'm Mike Parons. And I'm the chief innovation officer at Qualitance, and today we're going to be doing a case study on Revolut who we have called the Amazon of banking. So we're going to dig right into, uh, what they've been doing and see fundamentally what we can learn from them.

So to get you up to speed. These guys have been quite busy the last five years since they started. They have over 10 million users. They have over 800 million in funding. Evaluation is roughly a five, five and a half billion and they have over 2000 staff. So they're doing a lot of things right. I can promise you that.

I think they're moving into disrupting a very traditional market. So that's also very interesting. And I think that, uh, unlike the WeWork case study, I think these guys are pretty strong [00:01:00] across the board and showing all the signals that they are going to dominate the market. So what a perfect time to look in to learn to understand what they're doing so well.

Now as usual, we're going to use our famous bottom up, four P's, people, product, profit and promotion to understand their business. And the reason I really liked these so much is we get to look on the outside of the business, on the inside of the business. It's a very good way for us to understand what they're doing and really to try and try and learn from them.

So. For today's episode, we're going to get into the world of product. Let's dive in there, and I think the first thought that I have for you is this really is not just a good product. I think it's actually a great product, and the reason for this has got two characteristics. The first thing is it's solving a massive problem.

I mean, money is really important to get so much done in our lives. This is not a nice to have. This is [00:02:00] pretty much, you got to have this. And what goes alongside that so very well is this is something that you use every single day, whether your buying things, transferring, checking balances, traveling, you name it.

Um, money kind of comes up a lot. And so they're very lucky. I think of this very much like a venture capitalists, a wet dream. I mean, this is perfect for them. This is. Hey product, that solves a big problem and it solves every single day. So I mean, this is getting on the home page of your iPhone. I mean, this is a great product.

So let's have a look at the kind of five key pillars of what they're doing now. And I will say this, that they are releasing new features pretty quickly. So I think you can expect this to double or triple by 2021. So Revolut will help you manage your money, travel with these, uh, send money, uh, to friends.

[00:03:00] Um, they've got some good security phages and lastly, they've just really ramped up their exchange on cryptocurrency, so pretty solid start there and can, considering that they already have 10 million users, and it's a pretty phenomenal. Job. Now let's break down even further to some of the things that they're doing.

Some of the things that we can learn from how they're building their product, and you might want to put these features into your product to number one. The first thing that they are doing is they have a very clear focus on this thing, which we call that aha moment. And what that is, is they know that when you transfer five-year-olds to a friend, it's so easy, so far, so instant, so satisfying, but you're sort of hooked on their product after that.

You've really got it. And so they really focus on getting customers to that moment of transfer as quick as possible. And now if they do this, you know, they pretty much know that they're gold. And the real, um, [00:04:00] reminder in this product is it is insanely simple. And this enables. Both speed and ease of use.

Like you don't have to think too hard to get the jump down here. And sometimes when I look at how easy it is to transfer money on Revolut, I kind of feel like they've removed every single step or click that they could. Much like in the way Uber, for example, really tries to remove any data entry. Uh, you don't have to get out of your credit card.

So in that way, I think Revolut is quite similar to Amazon. Now, the next thing is that what they do super well is they have this incredible useful search. I don't know about you, but I find search pretty rotten with most of my banking products that I use, either for home or for business. And what they've done is they've done a couple of really, really good.

Um, industry practice practices, first of all, they start pre-loading results as [00:05:00] you type and they give you predictive search, meaning that as you're typing, I try to guess the word that you are are actually typing in. Again, these are little micro seconds, uh, that they are trying to cut out of the experience so you can get there as fast as possible.

So that search is really important and it's almost Google. Like. And the way you search now, why my banks don't make search, and it's such a straightforward, standard, uh, feature. It's just amazing to me that that Revolut have been able to come along and produce something that is just so simple and easy to use and so compelling compared to the industry.

Okay. Next thing. This is the third thing they do around product, which I think is super interesting is they've done some really interesting thinking around the product and how they want to build it, and it means that they can introduce new features really quickly and easily. I will come to how they, how they've actually engineered on the [00:06:00] back end to do that, but I want to stay with the front end features right now.

They offer a really compelling ease of use. When we moved to additional products or features, and this is what we call in the industry that cross sell. So in this case, it's very easy, easy for me to jump into, say crypto, um, when I'm just finished checking my balances and because they make this so easy, it's so seamless.

One app. What's really interesting is a lot of banks that I've used my investment app, it's actually a separate app to the normal banking app. Just a little bit of extra friction there. Revolut have have removed those, so they make crypto investing really easy. Now, I mentioned a little bit about, uh, the thinking in terms of backend architecture and how they think about the product stack.

Now this is the fourth thing that we can really learn from them. They call it banking as a platform. This is just another fancy way of saying end to end application. [00:07:00] So, um, I want to unpack this a little bit through an example. Um, and, and the starting point here is that they, they build, um, most of their core features, if not all of them themselves.

And they have very little third party dependencies. This gives them an, a couple of really key benefits. They are agile. They can release new features really fast. And, um, they understand the product stack. So if they need to, to change something in the way a particular feature works, say a credit check, they can do that with great control and precision.

If you're licensing it through a third party becomes a bit harder because you have to go with a third party now. I've got this great example I want to share with you. Uh, it's around a card fraud detection system. And in the case of Revolute, what they went and did is they went and built it all themselves and they called it Sherlock.

Now, what's really interesting about Sherlock is they built it in jus...