Almost seven out of every 10 adults in Malta use Revolut, with the number of users rising by almost a quarter last year, the company has said.
In an exclusive interview with Times of Malta, the fintech giant revealed there were currently around 300,000 Revolut customers in Malta – equivalent to 68% of the adult population, according to the most recent census figures.
“In terms of market penetration, Malta is one of our top five markets... in terms of penetration and usage, the adoption in Malta has been very surprising,” said the company’s head of growth for Southern Europe, Ignacio Zunzunegui Gómez-Gil.
He said the company’s userbase grew by almost a quarter (23%) last year and had increased by seven per cent so far in 2024 while the number of users regularly using their Revolut account had also grown.
“In terms of monthly active users – which for me is the best example [of the company’s userbase growth] – that also grew at the same rate, or slightly higher than 23 per cent in 2023... It’s not that we’re just acquiring customers then losing them,” said Zunzunegui.
Meanwhile, deposits in Malta rose by 40% last year and customers spent more of their money inside the country, he said.
“The share of foreign transactions has reduced year-on-year. We were at around 24% of transactions happening externally – when someone opens a bank account in Malta but uses it abroad – but that has reduced to around 19%.”
And, with monthly in-person payments increasing by around 55 per cent from the previous year, users were increasingly using Revolut for their day-to-day spending, he said.
Revolut was launched in the UK in 2015 and, by the end of June this year, had attracted 45 million customers worldwide and expanded to 38 countries, according to the company’s annual report for 2023.
The company offers transactions in a range of currencies, physical and virtual payment cards, user-to-user payments and cryptocurrency trading, among other services.
It now also offers personal loans in Poland, Lithuania, Ireland, Romania and Spain and, according to media reports, is due to offer mortgages in Ireland from next year.
Will personal and home loans be coming to Malta?
“I don’t see why not. It is something that’s on our road map and we’ve demonstrated in the past that, in many cases, Malta has been one of our early markets to test [products in] given the high adoption. But the ‘when’ is a bit tougher,” said Zunzunegui.
“The end vision is to offer a wider portfolio of traditional products for day-to-day finance and that includes credit... [but] I don’t see this necessarily happening in 2024.”
Business and fishy business
Zunzunegui said Malta had also seen an “accelerated growth” in the number of business users, with the number of business accounts growing by more than 170% this year.
Asked how this compared to other markets, he said the uptake of business accounts in Malta had grown “significantly faster than other Southern European benchmark markets”.
But, as the platform grew, so has the potential for abuse.
Last year, a Times of Malta investigation into an illegal cannabis and psychedelic mushroom-selling operation showed the group behind it accepted Revolut among its payment methods.
And with Revolut customers able to send payments to other users without knowing anything more about them than their username, or ‘Revtag’, is Revolut concerned about its platform being used for fraudulent transactions?
“It’s a very good point and we are trying to be very productive and sophisticated in how we identify these transactions... But I think if you look at our competitors, we’re probably one of the best positioned to deal with fraud,” he said.
The end vision is to offer a wider portfolio of traditional products for day-to-day finance
In September, the police warned of scammers purporting to be calling from Revolut targeting Maltese residents.
And, shortly before this interview, a person claiming to be from Revolut called this writer using the messaging platform WhatsApp in a bid to extract personal information.
Acknowledging that tactics used by scammers were “evolving very quickly”, Zunzunegui stressed these were a “top concern” for the company, pointing to the rollout of recent security features to protect deposits using biometric security checks.
But he stressed the company would “never” call and ask for details via WhatsApp, emphasising that all communication from the company would be through its mobile app.
End goal?
Asked if Revolut was aiming to become the main bank for Malta, Zunzunegui said the company was aiming to become “one of the top three entities” across all of Europe.
“It’s quite ambitious... there’s still a bit of time to get there and it comes with the launch of more traditional products [loans]. But, yes, that is our vision,” he said.
“We have a lot of work to do but I think the trajectory is definitely a positive one and getting us closer to that.”