We’d love to hear a little bit about your role at Revolut and it would be great to hear about your journey. Can you give us a quick overview of how you got to your current role as senior business developer with Revolut?
Anita Koimur: It has now been more than a year since I joined Revolut, described as the fastest-growing Fintech startup in the UK and Europe, the Financial Super App with over 10m users and $5.5bn valuation, and many more titles. Previously I was heading business development at Aitarget, an ad tech partner of Facebook, Google and Snapchat and where my key vertical was finance. Quite naturally, one day I bumped into Revolut and could not resist its relentless drive and global ambitions; so I joined the team quite soon to help build an ad solution – Revolut Perks – inside the modern mobile fintech app.
Regardless of being in charge of strategic partnerships at Perks for over a year, I can only say this journey has just started and only 1% complete.
Can you tell us how Revolut fits into the affiliate marketing ecosystem? How do you work with publishers and merchants?
AK: At Revolut, we launched a strong acquisition and engagement platform called Revolut Perks, through which we can promote partner brands through tailored promo campaigns sending cashback or discounts offers to our 10 million user base. From the beginning, we needed a strong offering of consumer brands to make this a success. Therefore, working with leading affiliate platforms fitted perfectly within our growth strategy. We found a natural partner in these networks like Partnerize. They have helped us build our amazing product by giving us access to top brands from a wide range of different categories. We love working with partner brands that truly meet our customer expectations on a daily basis.
What does Revolut do to create customer loyalty in space that is dominated by established brands/banks?
AK: We still believe that loyalty is a key lever for sustainable growth and customer engagement, but we took a different approach towards it. While other big companies and banks work with classic rewards schemes like points and miles, we use the high tech capabilities behind Revolut to bring personalisation and hyper-segmentation into the rewards space. We followed a completely different approach when we built our Perks programme from scratch; we built an actionable data-driven infrastructure that delivers the most relevant offers to the right customers in the right time.
In short, what opportunity does Revolut offer brands, when working with Partnerize, other platforms and networks?
AK: Revolut Perks can drive incremental sales for any brand. We have an ever-growing, global customer base that we can hyper-target with the best offers while actively promoting them through different owned channels, like push notifications, in-app banners and email. Also, the attribution process is handled automatically through the affiliate partner, so no integration or manual process is required. As a result, brands find in Revolut Perks a solid growth partner that offers precisely tailored campaigns, reasonable customer acquisition cost with high ROAS and no operational overheads.
Everyone talks about data-driven marketing. How does Revolut go above and beyond to leverage data when creating value for advertisers and users alike?
AK: We built a Recommendation Engine within the Revolut Perks product. It is based on machine learning algorithms that are capable of automatically choosing which cashback offers or discounts will be more likely to be relevant for each set of customers. This powerful “machine” uses multiple variables like purchase history, consumer behaviour and other demographics data to determine the best audience for each brand and offer. This is highly valuable equally for our customers as they always receive relevant offers and for advertisers because they can obtain higher engagement, conversion rates and lower acquisition costs from these campaigns than from other digital acquisition platforms or channels.
What does fintech mean to you, and how does Revolut fit into the fintech landscape?
AK: Fintech as an industry is absolutely exciting as it is deeply integrated in my everyday life. As per Revolut, it wants to go far and beyond traditional finance. Our vision is to build a Financial Super App – a single app where consumers can manage all aspects of their financial life. This is what has made Revolut become a reference in the sector and one of the fastest-growing fintech companies in the world.
How has access to richer campaign and demographics data helped you prove the value of the business you are driving. What benefit do partners see in using Revolut?
AK: Our partners work with us because they rely on our ability to add value to their prospective and existing customers. They find on Revolut Perks a powerful acquisition and retention tool that complements their digital marketing strategies. We own the real-time data, not only the demographics but also the transactional and contextual data, so we can use it in a smart and non invasive way to launch relevant campaigns and harness the power of personalisation.
Can you give us an example of a co-branded partnership campaign that Revolut has facilitated and how it worked?
AK: We launched a very successful campaign with Trainline, a leading train ticketing platform through the Partnerize affiliate network. Offering tiered rewards for Revolut and Trainline customers, the campaign resulted in a steady increase in the number of transactions, a 6x uplift on average, a 400% increase of Revolut purchasing from for Trainline over six months; as well as a consistently higher Average Transaction Value (ATV) +15% among those using the Perks offers to purchase from Trainline.
What are Revolut’s plans for focus and expansion in 2020?
AK: In 2020, we’ll keep growing and increasing our capacities globally. We’ve just rolled out Revolut in the US in March and we will carry on launching in new big countries throughout the year, as well as introducing new products like Junior accounts for kids from 7-17 years old. After its success, we will be also rolling out our Perks platform to more countries very soon as it is now only available in the UK.
Do you have any parting advice for brands and/or partners looking to expand their operations to the UK?
AK: I believe that a global mindset is key for international success, at Revolut we are a very international team, with people from all around working together. Also, finding reliable global partners is fundamental to scale rapidly, we will definitely rely on global affiliate platforms like Partnerize and global brand partners to continue scaling our product internationally.
