Revolut is a full-stack financial platform, headquartered in the UK and founded in 2015. The app enables 15.5 million users to trade everything from stocks to commodities and crypto, with 30 crypto-currencies currently offered out of the box.

As one of the top neobanks in the world, Revolut is always looking to launch new products and improve their existing offerings. According to Edward Cooper, Revolut’s head of cryptocurrency, the organization’s current goal is to become “the number one go-to super app of finance.”

Last month, Revolut confirmed that they raised $800M at a $33B valuation, making them the most valuable UK fintech[1] and demonstrating how far they’ve come in moving towards this goal.

We sat down with Revolut to learn exactly how they’re accomplishing their ambitious objectives with the help of the Fireblocks platform.

1. Develop direct custody within the organization

One of Revolut’s top goals in becoming the “go-to super app of finance” was to provide a full suite of crypto products that customers were requesting, and launching a customer withdrawal feature was especially critical to this plan.

In order to launch customer withdrawals, Revolut needed to get rid of one primary barrier – the closed-loop crypto model that comes from working with a crypto sub-custodian. To do so, they researched technology providers that would enable them to build direct custody within their organization.

Ultimately, they landed on Fireblocks, as MPC-CMP cryptography provided the security and operational flexibility they needed to custody their own digital assets. MPC simplifies private key management, and gave Revolut the peace of mind that their digital assets are protected from cyber attacks, internal collusion, and human error.

2. Eliminate manual treasury management processes with the Fireblocks Network

Revolut was also looking to streamline inefficient processes in certain areas, including treasury management.

The Fireblocks Network is the first and only institutional digital asset transfer network. Today, it connects users to over 400 trading venues, liquidity providers, counterparties and lending desks.

For Revolut, bringing settlements onto the Network eliminated manual processes while guaranteeing an excellent price for users and reducing counterparty risk. The Network made it possible for Revolut to efficiently scale the framework of its crypto services by streamlining its storage, liquidity access and settlements while maintaining governance and compliance.

“We were anticipating that there would be a crypto bull run, and that would mean that volumes would increase,” says Mr. Cooper. “Before Fireblocks, our processes had been largely manual, logging into different providers to do rebalancing and so on. I think that, if we hadn’t onboarded a partner like Fireblocks, we would have struggled to keep up with the increased volume during the bull run.”

3. Free up time and resources to launch new products

Revolut is currently achieving their goal of rolling out advanced crypto features faster; their engineering team now has the time and resources they need to focus on launching new products.

The company just needed one integration via the Fireblocks API and they’re able to keep pace with the industry, because Fireblocks constantly updates the platform for new initiatives. When Fireblocks integrates and adds new protocols and tokens, it’s easy for Revolut to also add those features for their own customers.

Fireblocks is quick to innovate and add new integrations (e.g. with exchanges). While Fireblocks handles the heavy lifting on the tech side, the Revolut team can focus on developing exciting new products.

“The cryptocurrency space is obviously moving very fast. Revolut wanted a technology provider that would be able to keep pace with the changes that are happening in the industry, allowing us to have one place that we could plug in,” says Mr. Cooper. “We just wanted to have one integration that would rule them all, and this is what Fireblocks provided us with.”

Interested in learning more about how Revolut is using Fireblocks? Read our latest case study, How Revolut eliminated closed-loop custody and manual treasury operations to scale their finance platform with Fireblocks, for the full story.

Citations

[1] TechCrunch, Revolut confirms a fresh $800M in funding at a $33B valuation to supercharge its financial services super app, Ingrid Lunden