Revolut CFO quits after auditor BDO warning (opens in new tab)

In an unrelated matter, experts are baffled at the ongoing weakness in the banking sector.

1. The part I quoted suggest that any statement by management about revenue-related balances may be unreliable.

2. The 'Basis for qualified opinion', which does refer to the financial statements is clear that they were unable to verify almost 500MM GBP of revenue.

  ... we were unable to satisfy ourselves by the execution of such procedures or by alternative means concerning the completeness and occurrence of revenue within these streams totalling £476,856k which is included in the Statement of Comprehensive Income and Note 6 of the financial statements for the year ended 31 December 2021. Consequently, we were unable to determine whether any

Regarding #2, if these numbers turn out to be incorrect, then it's extremely unlikely that the income statement could be adjusted without the balance sheet also being adjusted. The income statement reflects changes in the balance sheet over time. If the changes turn out to be wrong, then there are three possibilities:

A) The most recent balance sheet is wrong.

B) The previous balance sheet was wrong.

C) Both (A) and (B).

Also in 2008, the UK had an issue where 350k residents had deposits at Icesave, a savings account offered by Landsbanki in Iceland, that went bust. The bank wasn't registered in the UK, and the government of Iceland refused to provide compensation for those that lost their deposits. They probably want to avoid a repeat of that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icesave_dispute

I really don’t understand why so many people in the UK use it as the deposits are not FSCS protected so if something goes wrong you’re fuck out of luck.

Back to Revolut - I'm of two minds about bank apps. On the one hand, good apps are good, and some things really get streamlined this way. On the other hand, this only sets us up for another battle in the war on general-purpose computing: a fight over mobile device ownership.

Banks didn't just improve the UX of their apps. Some made them the primary or sole remote interface to one's accounts. Many (most?) are now using apps for 2FA, and heavily pushing it - with such banks, using the web interface from a PC browser still requires confirming any meaningful operation via the smartphone app.

The problem here is, banks are one of the most eager users of remote device attestation features, and (by being big and full of money) they have all the leverage over users and smartphone vendors alike. Many bank apps will refuse to run if they detect the phone isn't pristine and fully locked down by the vendor - and with modern phones now coming with built-in APIs for such checks, rooting the phone or flashing it with custom firmware is quickly losing all value. After all, what good is a rooted phone if you can't use it for anything important that smartphones now do?

I hate the Revolut app. It's busy messy and half of it is ads for their premium and affiliate products.

The CFO of all people should have advised withdrawal of their application until internal controls were sorted. That they're resigning instead doesn't bode well.

From the FT, their UK operations chief departed as well: https://www.ft.com/content/f27f6b80-d32d-4913-991d-c512f6e90...

But it is like a smoke alarm going off. It doesn’t mean there is a fire but there could be.

This company is so big that it should have a mature infrastructure for this type of thing. It is quite strange and thus suspicious that it is running its business is a haphazard way that it can not be effectively audited.