00:57:21 · Nik Storonsky
[00:57:21] S1: And anyway, we went went very deep into, you know, performance marketing, LTVs, payback. And then recently we also started doing because we got a banking license and then what we realized or what I realized quite early on is all about trust. Right? If you're a digital bank, you don't have branches, people don't see you physically. They trust you less by definition compared to HSBC, Lloyd's, JPMorgan Chase, and so on. Then... Okay. How you build trust? How you arbitrage effectively performance marketing spend? Because in performance marketing spend, you pay per impression. And then there are a lot of spaces in the physical world which you can buy, which will also produce impression, but at a much cheaper price compared to traditional world. So, for example, we bought probably now 50% of all airports in in Europe. Right? Like in almost 50% of airports in Europe will now have ads. Right? Again, because of a simple math. How many times a year people travel. Right? How many times a year they're in the airport? How many impressions we produce? How much will it cost us? Right? Now there is arbitrage to performance marketing. And then similar ideas to to other places in physical world. For example, we we started now doing equivalent of legacy branches, what we call called RevStore. Right? Rev experience. So we set up first first shop in Barcelona. Again, I'm trashing impressions of... In physical world versus the digital world. Because how many people pass every year our shop? I mean, it's more like Revolut experience. So it's not a real banking legacy branch. You come in and then you experience all our products. It's all done in a very modern way. Like, type of store bought for for for for Revolut. And then the idea is that we we just generate impressions for people who... Which pass the street who come come over as well.
00:59:14 · David Senra, Nik Storonsky
[00:59:14] S0: Like a lot of companies advertise in airports. And it's just like, oh, it's like, it's up on the screen maybe for thirty seconds or whatever. It might be one billboard. It's like, you walk, I'm walking for like two minutes and it's still, I'm like enclosed. There's like a huge, like I'm in a cocoon of Revolut ads. And how did you come up with that idea too though? [00:59:31] S1: Just buying full airports. [00:59:33] S0: I can't think of another company that I've seen do this. And I think like, it's actually a really smart move. More people should do that. It's like I I'm... There's... It's... I may not use your services, but like I definitely know you exist and what you do. Like you're essentially aiming for ubiquity is the way like I was thinking about that when I was walking to the airport. [00:59:48] S1: Yeah. In my mind, we're just in our paying for impressions much cheaper compared to... In physical world compared to digital world. [00:59:53] S0: It's not just like paying for impressions though, because like, you know [00:59:56] S1: I mean, building trust as well. Yeah. I
00:59:58 · David Senra
[00:59:58] S0: I hear the trusting was actually one of the most interesting insights. And you said a lot of interesting shit today. But like, I think there's something about the ubiquity of it. It's not just one sign saying, you know, this is Revolut and this is what we do. It's like entire hallways. Like you're just walking and I'm being surrounded by this. It's like, I'm telling you, I can't think of another company. This is before I even thought of having you on the show. Was just like, this is actually a really good idea. I'm not gonna walk past this and not know this company exists. One of last things I wanna talk to you about goes back to this grandiose ambition you have. I think people that may have not known you before this pick up on your super competitive. Mean, I love the fact that you were like, kind of got pissed off at VCs. All well now I have to compete with you because you made me so mad. But I've never heard anybody else building a bank. One, you said there's really no true global bank and you want to be the first one. So I like the level of ambition. But then you compare just like, we want to be a global technology company. And I think you might have mentioned a few companies, but the one I remember was like a global technology company like Meta. Explain that. The connection between what you're building, which may... People think maybe like even a boring, you know, business has been around for... Banks have been around for a long time, but that's not the way you're you're you're viewing what you're building.
01:01:10 · Nik Storonsky, David Senra
[01:01:10] S1: Yeah. Basically, our idea and our goal is to generate enough cash flow from this business to be able to fund, like, really big bets which can consume a lot of capital. Right? Like, for example, I would love to go into LLMs as well to build our own models. We in fact, you know, build our own transactional model called Pragma. So it's LLM, but all transformer based on transactions relevant words. But I would love even to go deeper, right, to kind of build our own data centers, to train our own model, all the models to kind of, [01:01:48] S0: you know, [01:01:48] S1: to do a lot deeper tech compared to what we do now. But then, you know, it it it requires a lot of investments. Right? And a lot of cash flow. So basically, to build a large business so that it produce so much cash flow, there it is possible to fund some kind of moonshot bets, which might not necessarily produce P and L in the next, you know, three, four, five years. [01:02:13] S0: Are these moonshot bets unrelated to, like, financial services?
01:02:13 · David Senra, Nik Storonsky
[01:02:13] S0: Are these moonshot bets unrelated to, like, financial services? [01:02:17] S1: Yeah. Most likely. Yeah. Because I mean, financial service, I mean, what else can we do? I mean, almost everything is invented already. So we just, like, ultimately, we're just rewriting legacy products. Right? So we're building the same financial products, but we're building them much cheaper and much nicer compared to older ones. Plus, we are putting them under one umbrella in one app. So it's all very convenient. Plus, also innovate on top. So they're all kind of interconnected with with each other, talk to each other. But ultimately, it's it's the same old banking but done in a new way. Right? So what I really love to do is to to to go out of it and then do something that was never done before. Inside the industry? In all industries, yeah. All industries? [01:03:04] S0: More like in my tech industry. Have you like shared publicly like some of these like moonshot ideas or you're like keeping inside the company?
01:03:04 · David Senra, Nik Storonsky
[01:03:04] S0: More like in my tech industry. Have you like shared publicly like some of these like moonshot ideas or you're like keeping inside the company? [01:03:11] S1: For now, all these ideas I just have, you know, in my head. And then I just know that we don't have enough resources and time to to to build them. But I hope, you know, in three, four, five years time, we might have enough resources to to build them. PRAGMA is a foundational model trained on our transactional data. As I said, we have 30,000,000 transactions every day. So we have billions and billions of transactions. And then it is possible, effectively, to train a transformer based model on transactions and then use it in, like, almost any aspect of financial services. So it can be anti fraud model. It can be credit model. Potential can be investment model and so on. When you [01:03:58] S0: launch here, why would I want to use your bank as opposed to, like, JPMorgan?