Revolut jumps into the payments acceptance space
The addition of the new service will place Revolut as a direct rival to established payments companies including Adyen, Stripe and Jack Dorsey’s Box.
Online banking firm Revolut moves to expand its operations on Friday with the launch of new tools and services that will allow its business clients to accept payments from their customers.
The move will pit Revolut against more established payment service providers such as Adyen, Stripe and Jack Dorsey’s Box.
Revolut’s new software is designed to allow its customers to install a plug-in ‘checkout’ or to build their own custom features with which to take card payments online.
Revolut business customers are also able to share those links with their own clients to enable the receipt of electronic payments.
For now, the service will be rolled out to Revolut’s European clients only.
Revolut, which was founded in London five years ago, has become a leading light in the UK capital’s Fintech scene thanks to its popular payment card and money management app, which allows users to make multi-currency transactions and payments. The business boasts 12 million personal customers and 500,000 business accounts.
It is the business sector that the new Revolut services are aimed at. This is a highly competitive, low margin but high volume space, with a global transaction value of just under $5 trillion forecast for 2020. With mobile point of sale (POS), customers using the payment functionality are expected to reach more than 1.80 billion by 2024. Transaction values are also forecast to continue to rise over that time frame.
Speaking about the new offering, Revolut’s CEO and founder, Nik Storonsky said that “Payments sit at the core of any business so we have crafted a solution that meets not only their business account demands but also their payment acceptance requirements. Companies across Europe know that it’s now essential to their success to be able to do business online.”
Revolut is late to the payments acceptance party, however, with rivals such as Netherlands based Adyen having a decade long head start and having processed €240 billion worth of transactions in 2019 that generated net revenues of €497 million.
The economic slowdown and shift to online shopping seen in 2020 has boosted volumes in the online payments space according to Adyen’s most recent trading update, which showed that processed payment volumes and revenues were up by +26% and +25% respectively.
There are not many sectors that can point to these sort of growth rates in the current climate and that’s likely to attract even more competitors into the space, and may even give rise to M&A within it.
