Revolut has landed in New Zealand

Barbarians at the gate? I have just done a search on “Revolut New Zealand” across Linkedin and this has only 1 mention. This suggests that either we are not paying attention or that the NZ market doesn’t regard this as material.

Perhaps some offshore case studies would be useful here, banking licence notwithstanding.

Under the CDR, open banking protocols now make the Revolut model workable. Add to this the Com Com Market study into personal banking services which is likely to look at both barriers to entry and impediments to innovation and disruptive firms and it starts to look interesting. I’d suggest this announcement is entirely predictable off the back of these developments.

Even if Revolut can be half as successful as they have been in Ireland then that should be cause for concern for incumbent banks. The real prize here is the winning of trust over time to a point where the legacy bank services feeding any Neobank off the back of open banking protocols begin to lose their relevance.

With the addition of a banking licence this then arguably leads to intermediation of deposit taking which then may lead to a significant change in current bank operating models as they are slowly starved of deposits.

Mosaic has a view on this developed over the last few years. Happy to discuss with anyone interested.