Niall Hearty considers an investigation into customer dissatisfaction with the bank.
Revolut was named in more reports of fraud in the last financial year than any of the major High Street banks.
The firm, which only received a provisional UK banking licence in July, was cited in almost 10,000 complaints to Action Fraud, the UK's reporting centre for fraud and cybercrime.
The figures, which were obtained through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests made by the BBC's investigative programme Panorama, show that Revolut topped the list for fraud complaints. It was followed by Barclays, which was named almost 8,000 times, Monzo (almost 5,000) and Starling (1,000).
The BBC investigation included testimony from a Revolut customer who had £165,000 taken from his business account in a matter of minutes by fraudsters who evaded fraud controls. The customer said there was no dedicated fraud helpline for Revolut customers, only a chat function on the bank's app. It took him 23 minutes to reach the right department to freeze the account – by which time another £67,000 had been taken by the fraudsters.
There has been criticism that Revolut may have cut corners as it sought to grow as quickly as possible. While such an accusation cannot, for now at least, be proved, the damning statistics do indicate that Revolut does need to make some major changes to its anti-fraud procedures – and probably should have done so before now.
Issues such as identity checks and monitoring of transactions need to be assessed and addressed so that the risks are identified and nullified. For a bank that was averaging almost a thousand fraud-related complaints a month, Revolut certainly has questions to answer about its response – or lack of one - to the problems its customers were regularly raising.
It is less than a month since Starling – another rapidly-growing new bank on the block – was fined £28.9 million by the Financial Conduct Authority for sanctions failings relating to a lack of screening of new customers. Revolut has not paid as high a financial price for its failings as Starling but its reputation has suffered. In banking, it seems the rush to become the biggest will not necessarily make you the best.
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