Revolut takes a step forward in Spain by introducing Spanish IBAN accounts and credit cards. Fintech, which has just reached two million users in our country, ends one of the great battlehorses that traditional banking has waged against it and is now supervised by the Bank of Spain. “We are taking an important step to challenge traditional banking,” Eduardo Pérez Toribio, head of credit and head of Revolut Bank UAB’s branch in Spain, and Ignacio Zunzunegui, head of growth for southern Spain, told elEconomista.es . Europe.
Thus, the introduction of current accounts with Spanish IBAN – it will be changed automatically for those customers who already had this service – will, among other things, offer the possibility of debiting all types of receipts by direct debit (so far some companies have been reluctant to do this). Movement due to the Lithuanian IBAN that the fintech had) and access to important services for customers like Bizum. In addition, according to the managers, they are in advanced discussions with the tax authority and social security to enable the collection of taxes and the payment of pensions, two functionalities that they consider important for the further development of their business plan. “The strategy is to position Revolut as the main bank for our customers,” say Zunzunegui and Pérez Toribio.
On the credit card side, the fintech relies on this product at the request of its customers, having introduced loans of up to 30,000 euros for its customers on the Spanish market last January. “We manage 15,000 to 16,000 loan applications every month,” they emphasize, pointing out that customers value the speed of approval compared to their competitors.
Credit cards
The Revolut credit card will have a limit of up to 10,000 euros and a price that the company describes as “very competitive”. This is therefore 0% APR if the payment method is chosen at the end of the month and 18.37% (TIN of 17%) if the customer postpones the payment. This product includes a cashback service – reimbursement of a percentage of purchases – initially 1% in the first three months of use (with a spending limit of 2,000 euros) and 0.2% in subsequent months, without a maximum limit. As a differentiator, the user can choose the billing date for purchases in a period of up to two months, compared to the traditional 30 days offered by other companies.
Launched a few days ago for select customers, this product now reaches the full range of Revolut users and joins debit cards and investment products ranging from ETFs to cryptocurrencies to commodities such as gold or silver. “Our goal is to democratize access to all types of products and make them all available in a single application,” say Pérez Toribio and Zunzunegui.
All this has led to them having more than two million users in Spain, one of them in the last year. “Domestic transactions have increased by 48% in a year,” they confirm from the fintech perspective, pointing out that at the same time, customers who had registered before 2021, that is, in their first phases in our country, are reactivating their accounts in the last few months .
The next step will be opening up the loan service they currently have to non-customers. “It will be one of the most important acquisition channels,” they emphasize. In addition, they do not rule out entering the commercial battle for payroll in the medium term, with direct remuneration in recruitment, as already offered by other competitors in the most classic digital banking.
