In a country where mobile payments are dominated by some of the world’s largest Financial Services Companies, the last thing you would think of is the entrant of a relatively young challenger bank. But Revolut might prove us all wrong! So let’s take a deep dive into Revoult’s reported expansion into China.
Revolut took the FinTech community by a storm when they published that they are seeking a “head of operations” in China. In their vacancy, Revolut listed:
“looking for strong players to lead their mission as we continue to expand into the Asia-Pacific region”.
The challenger’s expansion into China, kicks off an ambitious process that requires approval from Chinese regulators to enable them to operate in the country.
This is an interesting market entry, especially considering that Alibaba and Tencent alone control over 90 percent of the Chinese mobile payments market. Not to mention that China has launched a central bank digital Yuan which could further fuel the competition in payments.
This has left many payments enthusiasts wonder how Revolut plans on stand out in China’s unpredictable payments market. Revolut’s CEO is clearly aware of this as he recently emphasized that China is extremely competitive and it will probably require a lot of investments.
That being said, Revolut has proven to be bulletproof in a highly competitive yet young digital banking landscape. The business has attracted 15 million customers, nearly the size of the Irish and Greek populations combined. Not only that, but Revolut is one of the few challenger banks that broke even in 2020 despite immense losses in 2019.
While the Chinese payments market is very competitive, we believe that the Chinese government is ready to give Western payments and FinTech companies a go, with founders pointing to PayPal becoming the first Western business to gain a local banking licence in 2019 as a key milestone. But.. these two are not the only Western FinTechs to expand into China, the CEO of Checkout.com also mentioned that he opened a Hong Kong office a while back already in preparation for eventual expansion into the country.
We are interested in seeing which market Revolut plans on targeting and how it will be perceived by the Chinese population.
To conclude, the Chinese market remains extremely competitive, but the government is showing signs of embracing Western financial services firm. Revolut’s market entry just highlights the window of opportunities that lie within the region. Do you think Revolut will succeed in operating in China?
As competition in the payments ecosystem is riling up between traditional and challenger banks, reshaping core systems and technologies of traditional banking is long overdue. When talking about future-proofing banks and financial services, the term Banking-as-a-service is starting to come up a lot. But what is banking as a service all about and how is it reshaping the industry?
Apple’s push to secure a spot in the payments ecosystem is still going strong. Or at least that’s the plan — executing on it may be … well, not that simple. This is because Apple has been making moves to build a network of merchants, among the most critical components of the payment value chain … with functionalities that are already out there in the market.
If you’ve even moderately kept an eye on any payments related news source, there’s no way you have not been bombarded with the Buy Now Pay Later craze in 2021. Almost all the widely known payment players in the field who could partake in the BNPL craze… actually did. We are quite sure that you have heard about the likes of; Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay, but industry Giants such as Mastercard, Paypal, Visa, Square, Monzo, Revolut, Amazon, and even Walmart, are all offering BNPL options at checkout or are partnering with BNPL companies to offer this service to their customers. Even mighty Apple is climbing aboard.