A year and eight months in review: How have Revolut and Nubank evolved?
It won't be a surprise to anyone that both Revolut and Nubank have made significant improvements and enhancements to their respective digital banking platforms over the past twenty months.
Between 2023 and the end of 2024, Revolut added 137 new functionalities to its already impressive lineup, including interesting innovations such as:
- Opening joint accounts
- Buying mobile data plans
- Requesting a P2P transfer using a QR code
- Confirming in-app actions using Revolut's native Face Recognition technology
Nubank has similarly beefed up its digital platform with 104 new functionalities, including:
- Disposable cards
- Funding an account via open banking
- Street mode, which enables users to pick trusted WiFi networks and transaction limits for when their device isn't connected to one of them
- Buying insurance, including home, health, and device insurance
- Requesting an P2P transfer using a QR code
Overall, Revolut remains the more feature-rich app, with a total of 680 functionalities, while Nubank has 303.
But it's worth noting that, in this respect, Revolut is somewhat of an outlier, in the sense that it has the most feature-rich app out of all the firms on FinTech Insights' database.
Nubank in Europe: What are its prospects like?
While Nubank has a strong feature-set, FinTech Insights' Gap Analysis tool shows a few missing functionalities that, should they be added to the offering, would make it even more competitive in Europe. This is especially crucial, given that many of these functionalities are now considered essential by European consumers. These, for example, include the ability to:
- Fund an account via a debit card
- Open a foreign currency account, or send money abroad
- Dispute a transaction, without having to interact with a virtual assistant through chat
- Opt for an easy investment option, such as a robo-investing portfolio
- Analyse expenses, change a transaction's assigned spending category, view transactions by category, and set budgets by category
- Lastly, although Nubank offers the ability to replace a damaged, lost or stolen card, it does not provide the user the ability to apply for an additional debit card
The flipside is that, despite these gaps, Nubank is still more feature-rich than 50% of the European banks in our data-set.
But the more important point is that breadth of functionality doesn't automatically translate into a superior user experience, the metric a majority of European consumers value above all else.
And, here, Nubank scores higher on our Perfect 1000 UX scoring system than many established European legacy banks, including several well-known multinationals.
A look at the crystal ball: Could Nubank take on Revolut in Europe?
Revolut may well have the most feature-rich app in FinTech Insights' database, but Nubank is still growing from strength to strength.
At the end of 2024, Nubank's user base hit 100 million, double Revolut's. A feat that's all the more impressive when you consider that, where Revolut is available in over 40 countries, Nubank only operates in three so far: Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia.
Could this success translate to Europe, should Nubank decide to put its expansion plans into action?
A large part of Nubank's success in Latin America is down to the fact that, when it launched in 2013, there was nothing like it on the market. Legacy banks were exorbitantly expensive, inaccessible, and perceived as untrustworthy. So, for vast numbers of people, their Nubank account was the first financial services product they'd ever opened.
That's not the case in Europe, where the banking industry is mature and highly developed.
That said, Nubank's strong breadth of functionalities and good UX score mean it's still well-placed to give Revolut a run for its money.
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