Money app claims to have already saved businesses over £1m in exchange rates and transfer fees.
Banking challenger Revolut is known for the frenzied pace at which it signs up new customers. It looks as though its business-facing proposition will stay true to form.
16,000 businesses across Europe and the UK have signed up to Revolut for Business since its launch in June, including more than 4,000 in June alone. The firm hopes to hit 20,000 accounts by the end of the year, with businesses signing up at a rate of roughly 40 a day at present. At launch, Revolut revealed that it had signed up a number of unnamed FTSE 100 companies.
Users of the service can sign up for multi-currency accounts in minutes, issue corporate cards and make money transfers in 26 currencies at the interbank exchange rate. Revolut believes that its business customers have already saved over £1m in exchange rates and transfer fees.
The business account features many of the same features as the consumer-facing version of the app, which is well on its way to a user-base of 1 million people. These features include real-time spending notifications and instant money transfers between app users.
But Revolut for Business will soon introduce new features, including uniquely designed corporate cards for employees and integrations with accounting software like Xero. Fellow banking disruptor Curve, which caters to business owners, directors, freelancers and contractors in Europe, beat Revolut to the latter punch by integrating with Xero earlier this month. The partnership allows users to process expenses seamlessly.
Revolut also intends to launch business merchant accounts, allowing business users to accept payments from customers around the world without incurring excess foreign exchange fees.
The company, never short of a plan or twenty, has also just launched “the Revolut for Business Open API”. This will allow customers to automate the core functions of Revolut’s business accounts from their own systems.
“Revolut for Business was born out of our frustrations with the pains of opening and managing business accounts in the UK and abroad,” explained Nikolay Storonsky, founder and CEO of Revolut. “Businesses were being offered poor deals with hidden exchange fees, coupled with the problems they faced with complicated, slow platform interfaces.”
In need of a spokesperson to endorse its business accounts, Revolut turned to UNILAD.
“Revolut for Business has been hugely important to our financial operations, allowing us to fully benefit from the savings on our international money transfers,” said Kwame Agyei, head of finance at UNILAD. “Our in-house production team can each use a single card for both domestic and international shoots, while the single platform with a clear user breakdown makes the audit trail a breeze to follow.”
