Revolut: AI against fraud on customers’ payment cards

Revolut, the super financial app, has announced the launch of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based feature to detect fraud on customers’ payment cards. 

Revolut: a new AI-based feature against customer card fraud

Revolut has announced today the launch of a new AI anti-fraud feature, which protects its customers from payment card scams.

In practice, the new feature uses sophisticated machine learning (ML) to detect if a customer is being scammed and then break the spell of the scammer, before the victim sends their money to the criminal. 

This functionality has been developed internally by Revolut’s financial crime team. 

In addition to determining whether there is a likelihood that a customer making a payment with a card is falling for fraud, the functionality acts by refusing the payment, if necessary.

In this way, the customer is protected from making further suspicious payments and is included in the in-app anti-fraud intervention flow.

Here, the customer is required to provide additional information about the transaction in order to verify whether they are a victim of a scam or not. 

The new AI anti-fraud feature is active in the Revolut app and available to customers worldwide.

Revolut and the new AI feature to protect customers from scams

Revolut chooses to use Artificial Intelligence technology to protect its customers from payment card fraud.

Not only that, since the introduction of the feature, Revolut has observed a 30% reduction in reported fraud amounts towards those merchants who are more commonly involved in fraud.

In this regard, David Eborne, Head of Fraud at Revolut, stated:

“We are very excited to launch our new AI anti-fraud feature that implements advanced technology to prevent scammers from taking advantage of ordinary people. We have spent months innovating and testing the product to ensure that customers can continue to spend and send money safely. For example, an increasing number of banks are tightening or heavily restricting the ability to make payments with a card on cryptocurrency and investment websites. With this advanced feature, instead of completely blocking such transactions, we ensure that customers who want to make legitimate payments can continue to do so, while at the same time we can intervene to protect those who are being led by criminals to engage in fraudulent activities, giving our customers freedom and security at the same time.”

The 2022 annual report and the closing for the year 2023

In late December 2023, Revolut app published its 2022 annual report and added its financial forecasts for the closing year 2023.

Already in 2022, Revolut has seen revenue increases from cards and interchange of 105%, for a total of $369 million. Subscriptions have also increased by +48% compared to the previous year. 

Also in 2022, the number of customers reached almost 10 million globally, increasing annual deposits by +71%. 

For 2023, the company had invested in the future growth of the app for a value of 259 million dollars in various activities. For example, 145 million dollars went to the “Sales and Marketing” department, over 78 million dollars in “New products and global expansion”, while the remaining amount went to the “customer experience” sector. 

The investment seems to have yielded an increase in the number of customers, reaching over 35 million, and in the number of employees (there are over 8,000). Moreover, the app has become the most downloaded in the “Finance” category in nine countries and among the top three in 15 countries in Europe. 

Anyway, Revolut’s stated goal was to close 2023 with $2 billion in revenue and achieve a double-digit net profit margin.