Ep. 10 - Revolut announces big numbers, New Monzo Fraud Tools, Wise in hot water, Pay by Bank on POS gains more traction, PotN, BotN and more..
Grant Evans
Partnerships Leader @ NomuPay | LinkedIn Top Voice | Writer of The Payments Shed ✍️
Welcome to Episode. 10. Yup, we made it to double figures, who knew I’d rather enjoy this newsletter malarky. Anyway, let’s get into this one..
Revolut on the rise again?
It feels like I’ve not been able to open LinkedIn or any financial publication in the last 3-4 weeks without seeing something written about Revolut. There has been a mixture of positive ‘Revolut is going to take over the world’ stuff in there, paired with some of the more traditional ‘Don’t trust them, they still haven’t got their UK banking license’ commentary.
They have been confident of their UK banking license landing for so long now that I think I must have read that quote a thousand times. I personally don’t doubt they will get it eventually, but I have become tired of hearing the commentary on the apparent imminent status now.
What I do like is their approach to making Revolut an actual payment method for all Revolut users in the open market, akin to Stripe Link in some ways, but for a seamless account to account payment that will circumnavigate traditional scheme, issuer and acquirer fees. If they overlay that with interesting perks for their customer and merchant base, then it could indeed be a new payment method that will challenge the status quo in the market.
The decision from Nik Storonsky to offload a chunk of his stock whilst the company rides the crest of a good news revenue wave is relatively unsurprising. He could be cashing out as much as £500m in stock, based on recent reports.👇
However, with revenues at these reported levels, can you really blame him? 🤷🏻👇
Monzo rolls out new fraud tools
As reported by Finextra and others, Monzo has launched three new fraud tools on their platform.👇
It is interesting to me that they are all opt-in initially, which may hinder some uptake on the products, but it is good to see them available nonetheless.
I can't help but think that more banks should be following the lead here and delivering better fraud products to customers that can be implemented at the flick of a switch.
Wise Evolve Bank customer base data breach reported
Another week, another company reporting a data breach to customers. This time it is the turn of Wise, a leading money remittance platform in the market, advising that some of their customers have been caught up in the Evolve Bank data breach.
Given the money remittance sector often sees customers flip flopping between platforms for the best possible rate, it will be interesting to see if this news has any notable impact on Wise in the short term. I suspect if they counter the news with some better rates for a period of time then it is unlikely, but it isn’t a great bit of PR for the platform anyway.
Wise has a great platform and I suspect they will come out of this absolutely fine, but it shows the impact that third parties can have on your own reputation in the market once again when something like this takes place, even though Wise hasn’t directly lost any customer data. You can read more on this story via TechCrunch here.👇
Pay by Bank on POS boosted by DNA Payments launch
DNA Payments announced that they will be launching Pay by Bank (open banking powered payments) on their point-of-sale devices last month, joining UK alumni Acquired.com, MultiPay, EchoPay and Bankzy in delivering the solution to market in the UK (apologies if I missed anyone off this list).
Seeing a player with a significant retail point of sale merchant base join the club can surely only be a good thing for the awareness and adoption of the solution in the market.👇
The four-party model explained
I was recently asked to explain the moving parts of a card payment and it got me thinking that a bit more information on the four-party model in the market would be beneficial.
Essentially, the four-party model is the accepted framework in the payments industry for the transaction flow between buyers, sellers and every other moving part in-between.
I have put together the flow chart below to outline the moving parts in the process. You can delve further into this as well, but I think fundamentally these are the core elements that most people should be able to explain to a merchant when asked or educating.
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Are wearable payment vessels making a comeback?!
MuchBetter has announced they are offering free wearable NFC payment rings to customers who load up a new account with €100.
Initially launching in Italy, they will also be available in Germany, Austria, the UK, Ireland and Poland later in the year.
Now I had one of these rings which I picked up from McLear at Money 20/20 last year. I love the idea of it and mine worked great in Europe (I took it on two holidays to Spain and Portugal and it worked like a dream), however it was a different story in the UK for some reason, with every other POS device I used the ring on not accepting it.
I have no idea why that was and maybe I had a faulty chip or something, but it was what ultimately led to me ditching mine. I've noticed the rings are less clunky now and come in way more designs too, which should aid adoption.
It is a great PR exercise from MuchBetter as well and it is tempting me to give one of these another go in the UK!
You can get yours here if you live in Italy. 🇮🇹👇
I had one from McClear previously.👇
Pod of the Newsletter:
I would recommend that all commercial people subscribe to the brilliant ‘No Nonsense Sales’ podcast from Salesloft, hosted by the LinkedIn legend that is Tom Boston. They are short, snappy episodes with great guests and topics.
Two episodes that I really enjoyed listening to this month were:
One of the latest episodes focussed on ‘Sales Leadership’ with Penny Orme from Causeway, where they really dive into the power of empathy in leadership, which really resonated with me.
As well as an episode from back in May called ‘Underpaid’, featuring Jamal Reimer from Enterprise Sellers. This one is a very poignant reminder that implementing the right salaries and commission structures for sellers is so important.
Book of the Newsletter:
BOTN this time out goes to ‘The Lean Startup’ by Eric Ries. Having worked in start-ups and scale-ups in recent years, I really enjoying the advice that this book offers up to any budding entrepreneurs out there on what to avoid and how to identify what your customers really want in the best ways possible.
I also really like the concise Vision/Steer/Accelerate structure that the book deploys.
You can grab yourself a copy of the book here.👇
Thank you for reading folks, until next time..
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Picture & Linked Sources: The Paypers | Salesloft | Spotify | The Lean Startup | Sky News | Reuters | TechCrunch | Amazon | Monzo | MuchBetter | McLear
The Payment Solutions Guy — I'll help you decrease processing fees by 20%, and improve approval rates (guaranteed) by finding the best Payment Providers for your business | Visit my website to learn how
5moGreat, I'll definitely give it a read with my lunch!
Helping businesses with payments. Payments Leader @ Nomupay | LinkedIn ‘Top Payment Systems Voice’
5moAnother insightful round-up! Cheers!!