Traditional banks are well known for their lengthy queues and neverending bureaucracy. Unlike these banks, online banking allows customers to open new accounts, perform transactions, and perform many other banking actions online, within seconds.
That’s why online banking platforms like Revolut have been gaining momentum in recent years.
How to create a money transfer app like Revolut?
Launched in 2015, in only three years Revolut grew to 350 000 active daily users. According to financial statistics, this person-to-person platform is now valued at $5.5 billion.
What is a Money Transfer Software?
Money transfer software is a system enabling its users to perform banking transactions using cashless modes of payment, with multi-bank and multi-currency options. Moreover, such software, unlike traditional banks, is available at any time.
Money transfer software systems like Revolut are considered “neobanks”. Neobanks operate exclusively online and do not have any physical branches. This allows them to provide their customers with the fastest digital and mobile financial solutions. Therefore, their customers can pay, transfer, or lend money online.
Before you ask how to build an app like Revolut, let’s start with the basics.
Money transfer systems provide their users with such functionality as:
- The ability to manage different types of transfers
- Support for multiple countries, languages, and currencies
- Integrated security and privacy standards and regulations
- Availability of several money transfer options, such as online and mobile transfers
- Integration with fraud protection software and anti-money laundering software
- Transaction fee tracking
- Foreign exchange software integration
Revolut Success Story
Before we answer a question on how to build an app like Revolut, let’s do a quick review of Revolut’s history.
Its story began in 2015. Back then, ex-financial specialists, Nikolay and Vlad decided to start a product that would help other people to manage their funds and multi-currencies in a much simpler way.
At the very beginning, the key idea was to develop a system that, unlike traditional banks, would allow customers to make foreign money exchanges with low transaction fees. Such software was planned to be very helpful for managing a bank account, especially abroad.
MVP was successful enough to allow the company to attract its first 200 000 users. So they decided to start developing a fully-featured product.
According to TechCrunch, Revolut has raised $836 million in total over the past few years. Now, it is valued at $5.5 billion. Revolut is proud to open over 12 000 customer accounts daily.
Revolut success is measured by:
- A number of users. The company has more than 8 million customers.
- Annual revenue. The annual revenue of Revolut in 2018 reached over $58 million.
- Fundraising. Revolut’s fundraising rounds have surpassed $336 million in total.
Revolut App Business Models
Being a neo bank, Revolut works only online and does not have any physical branches. The monetization model of the company comprises:
- Subscription plans fees
- International transfer fees
- Service fees (withdrawals and overdraft loans)
Let’s review each part of Revolut monetization in detail.
Subscription plans
Revolut offers three types of bank accounts to choose from:
- Basic bank accounts are free to use.
- Premium accounts are available after the users get subscriptions. The cost of a Premium account is €7.99 per month. And €82 for an annual subscription.
- Revolut Metal accounts cost €13.99 per month and €135 for an annual subscription.
Fees
Revolut charges several types of fees, including rate fees and ATM fees:
- 0.5-1.5% exchange rate fee between currencies. However, this fee is only charged on the weekend. At the same time, on weekdays this service stays free.
- ATM withdrawals are partially free depending on the amount, withdrawal frequency, and account type. The withdrawal of £400 per month on a Premium account requires no fees.
Services
Revolut also takes additional fees for various value-added services. For example, it is possible to trade cryptocurrency for a 1.5% upfront fee or use P2P loans at a 9.9% annual percentage rate.
Reasons to Create Your Custom Money Transfer Software
Revolut was founded in 2015. In the 5 years since then, it is clear that the idea of neo-banking and money transferring software is a popular, profitable, and growing industry. So how to create a money transfer app like Revolut?
Every day, the demand for money transferring services continues to grow. According to Statista research on Digital Remittances worldwide, transaction value in the digital remittances segment is projected to reach $87,935 in 2020 alone. And it is expected to show an annual growth rate during 2020-2024.
However, let’s clarify the reasons to develop a custom money transfer software in 2020.
Everything is moving online
Our modern world is changing. People have less time to stay in one place for too long. Everything is moving online and becoming more mobile. Why use an old-fashioned bank with its physical branches and queues? There’s a smart mobile app that allows you to transfer money and make other payments. Just while you’re drinking your morning coffee.
Banking digitization makes it easier to use money transfers and online payment. But that’s not all. Money transferring software like Revolut also allows its customers to use expanded functionality. For example, insurance, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, splitting payments, or virtual saving accounts. All within a single mobile application.
Growth of demand
It’s been 5 years since Revolut was born. Since then, lots of neo-banking applications have appeared and many vendors have started to build a peer-to-peer payment app infrastructure. These days, you can see that the demand for fast payment has grown significantly and still prevails over the supply.
Online banking for business needs
Nowadays, money transferring software can be used not only by individuals but by businesses, too. For example, Revolut for Business is currently being used by 20,000 businesses. Build a mobile money transfer system, which will come in handy not only for regular customers but also for businesses. This makes a great opportunity for building new business collaborations and continuing to grow the neo-banking segment.
Must-Have Features of Peer-to-Peer Payment System Like Revolut
Before you start to build a peer-to-peer money transfer software, consider defining the core features. Here is a list of core functionalities that a peer-to-peer payment platform should have:
- Bill payments
- E-wallets
- Online ID check
- Payment statistics
- Notifications
- International transfers and currency exchange
- Multilingual interface
- Support
- Integrations
Bill payments
This feature is needed to provide your future customers with the ability to conduct payments at any time and from any place online. This feature will help give your product an additional competitive advantage and attract new customers.
Splitting and paying bills with Revolut
E-wallets
E-wallets can be online services or software programs that allow users to make electronic transactions.
When integrating such a wallet, users can interact with the service and pay contactless in every country they visit without having to create multiple bank accounts each time.
Revolut cryptocurrency wallet
Online ID check
Online ID verification is a process that helps to check whether your app interacts with a real person. An online ID check also ensures that your users are who they claim to be. Such a process prevents your product and your customers from any kind of fraud.
Adding an online ID check helps you make your own peer-to-peer payment system safer for your customers. It is helping them to feel more protected. We recommend integrating automated verification requests and setting money limits.
Revolut ID Verification
Payment statistics
A payment statistics system is a set of features that helps to visualize all the user’s transactions by such criteria as volume, status, receiver, or even country.
These features are especially good for those users who like managing their finances. Therefore, your platform will be more convenient and user friendly, attracting new customers, and making their experience smooth.
Revolut payment statistics
Notifications and alerts
Any notification is important. It allows you to inform your customers about all the actions within their banking account. For instance, you inform people about the status of their transactions, payments, or monthly subscriptions.
Revolut notifications
International transfers and currency exchange
Traditional money transfers can be long, delayed, or require exorbitant fees.
Moreover, traditional banks often demand that you visit a physical branch to conduct a transfer. By integrating online transfers and exchanges to a banking app, you would enable users to send and receive their money within a few seconds and swipes.
Revolut currency exchange
Multilingual interface
If you just start to create a peer to peer money transfer app, you can use a single language. It’s enough for MVP goals – for example, to represent your product to customers and investors.
But at later stages, it is worth considering adding multiple languages. This would help you grow and expand worldwide, attracting more new customers in each country.
Revolut multilingual interface
Support
The support isn’t actually a feature. It is a system of features that guarantee your customers can get help when they have questions or problems.
Your support system should comprise at least features for live chat, email, or call. However, online chats remain the most convenient choice. As your customers can get the fastest support just by asking a question in the in-app chat.
When it comes to fintech products, and especially for online banking, it is important that users feel protected when using a product. The support features gradually increase the sense of security of users, and encourage them to use the software more.
Revolut customer support
Integrations
Integrations are required to provide a connection with other world banks and money transferring systems via API and other protocols.
Money transferring software can be connected with different banks your customers use. So they can control their funds using your app.
In this way, your customers can access their assets in different places around the world by using your money transfer product. For example, ICICI Bank offers an API for open banking between banks and customers.
Revolut business integrations
Step-by-Step Guide on Building Remittance & Money Transfer App Like Revolut
Discovery phase
At Sloboda Studio, we recommend starting the P2P money transfer app development process with the discovery phase. That stage includes competitive market research. This helps to determine the core and unique features you need for your project. As well as the optimal tech solutions needed for these features.
Building a user-friendly UX
After conducting the discovery phase, start to build a user-friendly UX concept and product prototypes. Remember that your money transfer app is going to be used not only on desktops but also on tablets and especially smartphones. Thus, your product has to be adapted to various devices.
Money Transfer Software Development
During this stage, your team will work on the integration of all the core features. When you start to develop a Revolut alternative app, think not only about the front-end and back-end. Remember, it’s also necessary to integrate user management modules.
During the development process, we recommend using Agile principles and working in sprints. Such an approach will allow you to meet regularly, see the results of your work, fix any issues, and discuss development plans.
Reporting and accounting implementation
Any money transfer app requires reporting and accounting to monitor transactions, create advanced money transferring reports, set limits, and evaluate profits and losses. In the future, this will help you check the statistics inside your app. In their turn, your customers will be able to check their account’s statistics and control their assets.
Ensuring security
As with any banking system, your money transfer software requires the highest security to establish the safety of your customers. Consider taking advantage of identity verification. Services such as Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) help companies to verify users and prevent fraud. It is also highly recommended to include counter-terrorism financing compliance.
If you are just starting to develop a fintech app like Revolut, consider compliance with basic but necessary security options, such as data encryption, backups and recovery, limited access to certain parts of your system, and session time limits.
Cost to Build Custom Revolut Alternative Solution
Any product-development process is complex, consists of different stages, and is full of details you should pay attention to. Starting with the discovery phase and first wireframes development, your product will go through the technologies-choosing and features-determination phase. Therefore, make sure you’ve planned all of the below steps:
Number of features
The more complex your product, the more time and money it will take to develop its architecture. That’s why we always recommend starting with the discovery phase to outpoint the core features you need for a decent MVP. By starting development only with the core features, you can save time and money, launch faster, and get your first customers before you are ready to represent your product to investors, grow, and scale.
Technology
There are lots of technologies in the software development market. However, if you are starting to develop your product, you should pay more attention to flexible and scalable tech solutions. While “start-up-friendly” technologies like Ruby on Rails, Python or PHP, allow you to build and scale your product on budget, the more complicated ones like Java will require more money.
It is worth considering the popularity of chosen technology: popular languages and frameworks provide you with a bigger pool of qualified developers. Remember it as a start-up whose goal is focusing on speed and scalability.
Staff costs
Labor costs are driven not only by team size and seniority but also by taxes or office rentals, which may take a big part of your budget.
However, you can save some costs by choosing to outsource over in-house. Outsourcing development models allow you to start collaboration at budget prices and begin the development without further ado.
For example, the most popular outsourcing destinations are Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America:
- Eastern Europe. According to Clutch.co, Eastern European rates vary from $25 to $50/hour in such countries as Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus.
- Asia. Among Asian countries, the most popular are India, China, and the Philippines. Indian hourly rates are about $25 according to Clutch, while in China and Philippines software developers charge up to $50 per hour.
- Latin America. According to Clutch, Latin America’s agencies rate hourly from $25 to $100 in such countries as Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico.
That is why being an offshore development agency, Sloboda Studio can offer very competitive rates for the high-quality expertise of the development teams.
Getting a license
How to create a money transfer app? First of all, you should get a license to make sure your product meets all the law requirements. For example, the European electronic money license applicants should not only have a detailed business plan, structured organization, and good team and risk management, but also the minimum mandatory capital of 350 000€.
Legal costs
Starting a money transferring service, you’ll definitely spend some extra legal costs. Your investors and customers will be interested in lots of details of your product, for example, how exactly you’re going to transfer money or how good the protection of all the assets is. An experienced lawyer can make things simple and structures; however, the prices depend on a particular country.
Marketing
Sometimes vendors pay all the attention to product development forgetting about its promotion. Such an approach is risky because you may lose time if you start the marketing campaign after the development.
Working with start-ups for over ten years, we’d recommend working on software development and promoting one product at a time.
Once you begin to implement the core features, start to tell your target audience about your product. In this case, promotion helps to get new interested clients and make your product well-known and trusted among your potential users.
Our Experience
CityFALCON
CityFALCON is a fintech news aggregator. Its score rates financial tweets, news, and authors by using Natural Language Processing. CityFALCON makes it easier to monitor financial news and makes it easier for traders and investors to receive actual information to make the correct financial decisions.
Our solutions:
When we started our collaboration with CityFALCON, our client needed to improve an existing project MVP. Our main goals comprised creating a clean and simple UX, building the scalable architecture, and adding a news processing scoring algorithm.
CityFALCON is now a fully-developed project that helps people who work with finances, trading, and transactions to build their business more effectively. We are proud to say that we met all the initial goals and even exceeded them. CityFALCON fully-developed for iOS and Android mobile systems with voice assistant integration, and NLP-powered news feed, and a cryptocurrency coverage launch.
Origin Research
Origin Research is a fintech platform that provides its customers with financial data analysis for high-yield companies in order to trade shares. Our client’s goal was to digitalize their offline investment consulting business by developing a digital platform.
Our solutions:
As the platform requires access for various types of users (admins, free trial users, subscribed users) we had to develop appropriate functionality for each of them:
- Free trial users can view financial information on only 10 companies for 2 months, view limited information of the other companies, save models, compare companies and bonds, and change their personal information.
- Subscribed users can view all the financial data of all of the companies on the Origin Research platform, save and share financial models, change certain data in the models, save them and share with other subscribers
- Administrator roles include managers, analysts, support, and salespeople. We integrated functionality for each of them.
Origin Research now offers its customers primers, insights, detailed financial models, summaries, and reports.
Final Thoughts
Creating money transferring software is a fascinating process that can be long and challenging. However, at the end of the day, it’s always worth it. Businesses can go online, and traditional banking is already digital.
Ready to build a product similar to the Revolut app? Follow these three steps!
Step 1: Think about your business plan and monetization.
Step 2: Remember the core features you should implement first:
- Bill payments
- E-wallets
- Online ID checking
- Payment statistics
- Notifications
- International transfers & currency exchange
- Multilingual interface
- Support
- Integrations
Step 3: Make sure your product follows all necessary legal requirements.
Still, have questions? At Sloboda Studio, we have been developing and supporting businesses for 10 years. Feel free to book a consultation with us.
