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...