About ten years after their creation, two European neobanks, Revolut and Bunq, have just announced profits for the first time in their history.
Can the business model of neobanks enable them to achieve profitability? Many observers have been asking this question since the emergence, during the 2010s, of a myriad of new players from the digital economy and offering financial services, mainly on mobile phones, to European consumers.
Two of these players, the British Revolut and the Dutch Bunq, have just provided the beginnings of an answer. The two nobanks, which operate in France thanks to a European passport, have just announced in quick succession that they have recorded the first profits in their history.
More deposits and paid accounts
Founded in 2012 and with a full banking license since 2014, Bunq says it reported net profit before tax of 2.3million euros in the last quarter of 2022. The one that presents itself as the 2nd largest nebank in the European Union is therefore now profitable, thanks in particular to a sharp increase in its income from banking commissions (+37% over one year) and deposits from its users (+64%). , which reached 1.8 billion euros at the end of 2022.
Revolut, on the other hand, has been profitable for a bit longer. The nobank, which has only just released its 2021 results, said a net profit of £26.3million (about 29.6 million euros at the current price). Created in 2014 and having since 2021 a full banking license issued by the European Central Bank – which allows it to continue to operate in the Union despite Brexit – it also claims 27 million individual customers worldwide in 2022 .
Like Bunq, Revolut has seen a sharp rise in customer deposits: +58% between 2021 and 2022, to £7.4bn. Above all, she managed to convince a good number ofopt for a paid subscription: the number of customers paying between 2.99 and 13.99 euros per month to use its services has increased by 75%.
The number of customers using Revolut each week has increased by 50%, and their average spend by 10%. Sign of a deeper integration of Revolut in the financial life of customers, who use it more and more like an online bank on a daily basis, welcomes the press release from the nobank.
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