Revolut wants “one million users in Portugal”

Nikolay Storonsky, CEO of Revolut, expects to have over 500 employees in his new office in Matosinhos and he also believes that soon the company will reach one million users in Portugal.

One million users in Portugal in the near future. Nikolay Storonsky, founder and CEO of Revolut, was in Lisbon to take part in the Web Summit and said he hoped that the number of users in Portugal — over 300 thousand for now — will reach one million soon. If the company continues to grow as it does today — between 1,000 and 1,200 new users every day — that number should be reached within approximately one and a half years.

In the Portuguese capital, the head of the fintech announced that the startup will start grant credit in December, in some countries, without specifying which ones. To ECO, Storonsky added that the company’s office in Matosinhos will be inaugurated between the end of this year and the beginning of 2020, with over 500 workers. For the Russian, Portugal is an interesting market because, from his point of view, “it may have 10 million people, but the Portuguese language has a reach in several countries of the world, such as Brazil.”

In a country with over 330,000 users, the company’s president is more ambitious and hopes for this number to grow exponentially in the coming years. “As for the national market, we have the ambition to reach one million customers soon,” he said.

The fight against fraud was another topic of conversation, and the leader of Revolut underlined that this is one of the main focuses of the company. “We have about 500 people working on this topic alone, 150 of whom are engineers focused on compliance and fraud. Our philosophy is not to start from human decision but from models that offer us precision,” he explained about the method that, according to him, can be “eight times more competitive than traditional banks.”

“We want to create a truly global bank, present in most countries of the world.”

Despite the sudden fame of cryptocurrencies in the media, the CEO of the virtual bank said, contrary to what is thought, he hasn’t noticed a growth in demand for this currency. “I haven’t seen an increase in using cryptocurrency since 2017. There has been little adherence and I think one reason for this is the regulators, because they simply don’t like cryptocurrencies,” notes the CEO.

Nikolay Storonsky spoke a little about the company’s ambitions for the near future. “We want to create a truly global bank, present in most countries of the world. We want to offer services such as insurance, credit, and even investments. We are going to offer everything a person needs on a daily basis.”