{"id":614529,"date":"2025-10-23T10:00:03","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T08:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=614529"},"modified":"2025-10-23T10:01:38","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T08:01:38","slug":"controversy-around-new-digital-bank-launching-in-south-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/banking\/614529-controversy-around-new-digital-bank-launching-in-south-africa.html","title":{"rendered":"Controversy around new digital bank launching in South Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A new multinational digital bank that plans to launch in South Africa soon has endured several controversies in recent years, including having the highest number of customer fraud reports in its home country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Revolut is a UK-based neobank founded by British-Russian Nikolay Storonsky and British-Ukrainian Vlad Yatsenko in July 2015.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It initially offered a prepaid Mastercard for UK and European customers who wanted to pay interbank foreign exchange rates while spending abroad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the years, it gradually expanded its offering to include general banking, currency exchange, investment, and cryptocurrency products. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Revolut has amassed 65 million customers across 48 countries. In addition to the UK and Europe, it offers services in Australia, India, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, and Switzerland. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In late September 2025, the bank announced it would apply for a banking licence in South Africa as part of a broader expansion to reach 100 million customers worldwide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bank said South Africa represented a key growth market, underpinned by its diversified economy, increasing digital adoption, and growing appetite for innovative financial services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Receiving a full commercial banking licence will enable Revolut to deliver innovative and essential financial services that meet the needs of South African customers,” it said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Revolut South Africa CEO Jacques Meyer has extensive experience in the banking sector, including three years as Tyme South Africa chief operating officer and four years as Discovery Bank product head. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meyer said South Africans were “ready for a new approach to banking” and the market was “primed for disruption”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“We see a clear opportunity to bring our product expertise and customer-first approach to a country that is hungry for innovation,” the bank said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Becoming a licensed bank will allow us to bring a full suite of products to the market and ensure we become the go-to financial app for millions of South Africans.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Revolut has not yet shared a launch timeframe for South Africa, a recent LinkedIn post by Meyer said that the company’s global expansion to 30 new markets by 2030 will start in South Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Highest number of fraud reports among UK banks<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

While it has seen tremendous growth, with more than 10,000 employees and a profit of \u00a3790 million (R18.4 billion) in 2024, the bank has been the subject of several controversies in recent years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In its home country, several customers have complained about fraud on their accounts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Revolut accounted for the highest number of fraud and scam complaints<\/a> escalated to the UK’s Financial Ombudsman Service in 2023, 2024, and 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of the customers fell victim to fairly unsophisticated attacks, including giving away 2FA codes to fraudsters impersonating banking personnel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, Revolut has also been criticised for not providing a dedicated fraud helpline, with customers having to use a chat feature deep in its app to freeze their compromised accounts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In October 2024, UK fraud and cybercrime reporting centre Action Fraud found that Revolut had the most fraud complaints of any major bank in the country. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bank has also started developing a reputation for being less likely to reimburse victims than traditional banks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition, the Payment Systems Regulator showed the bank was popular with scammers, with \u00a3756 of every \u00a31 million could be attributed to app fraud. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Revolut has emphasised that it takes fraud and attacks from organised crime on banking customers seriously, with robust protections and analysis of billions of transactions every month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Third of staff are working on financial crime<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
A screen from the Revolut app on a smartphone in July 2024. Photographer: Betty Laura Zapata\/Bloomberg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The bank said its financial crime prevention team comprised more than a third of its global workforce, and half of its data scientists worked on financial crime-related topics or products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“We have developed sophisticated AI models capable of spotting and blocking potentially fraudulent transactions using hundreds of internal and external data points,” the bank said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“In 2024, we prevented over \u00a3600m (R13.97 billion) of potential fraud against our customers.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Revolut said it continually enhances security features. For example, this year it launched in-app calls to help customers quickly expose impersonation scams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It has also implemented real-time AI fraud detection systems, transaction limits, biometric authentication requirements, and provided educational resources to inform consumers about potential risks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bank said its complex investigations capability includes former law enforcement personnel and enables it to work closely with law enforcement globally, resulting in arrests of individuals involved in organised criminal activities targeting our customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bank also suffered a cyberattack in September 2022, in which an unauthorised party gained access to the personal data of more than 50,000 customers. Fortunately, no customer funds were affected by the incident.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2020, the bank’s algorithms wrongfully suspended several accounts for weeks or months at a time after detecting unusual activity on them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This included the suspension and closure of a business account belong to energy transition startup Priorit\u00e9 Energie, which resulted in the firm being unable to pay staff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Revolut issued a public apology for the mistake and corrected it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the last three years, Revolut has been the top bank in the UK in an area where banks don’t want to lead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341042,"featured_media":614543,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10106],"tags":[32262,65275,68022,9695,24410,165,101854,78860,101855],"class_list":["post-614529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-banking","tag-banking","tag-banking-crime","tag-banking-fraud","tag-crime","tag-digital-banking","tag-fraud","tag-nikolay-storonsky","tag-revolut","tag-vlad-yatsenko"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614529"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341042"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=614529"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":614719,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614529\/revisions\/614719"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/614543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=614529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=614529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=614529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}