The startup has raised [the funds] in a series B from existing investors Balderton Capital, Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital
It brings total funding for the challenger to $83m and the fresh cash will go towards pursuing expansion in Asia and North America and launch new products and services.
And just to re-emphasise the fact that it’s focus isn’t on competitions with the UK challenger banks…
“Revolut is on a mission to create a world where moving money is easy, instant, free and transparent, regardless of country or currency. It is removing barriers between people and merchants, enabling them to transact seamlessly around the world," said Index Ventures partner Martin Mignot.
Edit - They’ve just published their blog post with the news & some more info -
The infrastructure section’s not that meaningful to me, without an explanation of how their new providers will improve resilience.
We’re scaling our support team rapidly and have hired over 30 new support agents in the last two months.
But judging by their community there’s sill plenty of room for improvement.
Soon you’ll be able to open a personal EUR account in seconds, buy and spend Cryptocurrencies in-app and invest your spare change in company stocks and bonds with our new Wealth product.
I’ve had some mixed experiences with Revolut and to be honest, felt like they always had the feel of a fly-by-night operation. But $66m of Series B is nothing to be sniffed at, and I’m definitely going to be following their development with interest.
Their approach to multi-currency accounts resonates with me. I don’t know who I’ll be doing day-to-day banking with in a few years time but it will be a provider which lets me hold balances in more than just GBP.
Curve have just raised £10m in their series A round.
Prior to now, Curve had raised $3 million in funding
A consumer version of the service is scheduled for launch later this year, and although the near-term focus remains on Europe, we’re told that the U.S. could be on Curve’s radar in the future.
Yep, been using Cleo for a couple of months now, and I love it. According to Cleo, Starling will be ahead of Monzo in being supported as Monzo’s APIs aren’t ready yet. Cleo is very good indeed. Lots of humour and personality and fab features.
the banks refusing to send transfers to these new IBANs are in contravention of the latest SEPA regulations which say you are supposed to accept IBAN from any SEPA country and not discriminate against IBAN from other countries. In Netherlands they have even set up a helpdesk so people can report banks and employers who refuse to accept valid IBAN on national grounds. Also since the conclusion of the SEPAIO Project customers should only need to supply an IBAN to a bank and no longer need to supply a BIC code, so reading thru all those Revolut posts I can’t see why everyone is attacking Revolut when the problem lies with their historic big banks poor systems and failure to comply with latest industry codes and regulations.
Every time a new bank launches…Fidor, Starling etc…there are immediately two issues. Banks and retailers failing to keep card BIN databases and bank Sortcode databases up to date, so cards get rejected and direct debits and FPS payments get rejected. The banks then end up doing a valient effort at talking to the other banks but it can take them months to get results (I think Nationwide took 6 months to update their systems when Fidor complained)
Oh, I don’t think that the problem is the IBAN being a Lithuanian one. I think the problem is the mismatch of country codes in IBAN and BIC (IBAN starts LT, BIC contains GB as country code).
So, yes quite probably an issue with the legacy banks’ system still requiring BICs in the first instance.
Still interesting that Revolut would roll this out without proper testing. And that they would choose this IBAN/BIC combination. A bit of a screw up from both parties, if you ask me. Also can’t really see how to fix this (from Revolut’s side, who have apparantly promised a fix within a week), other than to issue new IBAN/BIC combination, as they can hardly force all European banks to update their systems (within a week or longer). My curiosity is certainly piqued to see how this turns out …
Other banks use different BIC country codes to IBAN codes particularly where they have agency banking or a head office abroad, e.g. a IBAN in say a Baltic state may have a BIC in Scandinavia.
That would seem to indicate an even deeper issue then. Would be interesting to see if Revolut can resolve this within a week as promised, as this doesn’t appear to be something directly in their control, but maybe I’m wrong…
