Out of curiosity by just do you mean today?
They use Barclays as their backend but is anything of that visible to their customers?
Barclays has been known to help startups by lending them their (global) infrastructure in the UK. Another Example is Dopay where Egyptian Barclays ATMs have been lent out.
The Bank of England is moving towards allowing non banks to participate in the payments system by 2020, its supposedly blockchain secured so it goes a notch above what a sole bank/firm could do. Revolut could theoretically switch from Barclays then.
You can think of revolut as a front end for barclays client pool account. This is a very simplistic explanation but what I'm trying to emphasize here is that the money revolut manages is effectively with Barclays.
So the idea of having Barclays is not to get traction or to have their own participation method later but to have the muscle of a bank that can handle large scale international payments.
There are other big banks who don't have something like revolut. So our solution can be a good proposition for them (Not saying that we don't have ideas for any new features. We do, but we've been caught off guard by the new announcement. It'll take a few more days to make it's way to the pitch)
>"Barclays has been known to help startups by lending them their (global) infrastructure in the UK"
Yes, but why? Barclays profits with every customer that revolut brings/ will bring. Other banks would want to profit in a similar way.
I didn't know about BOE but I don't think that switching banking partners after about 5 years of operation is going to be that easy... Not sure could be wrong.
