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Enhancing Bank Accounts with Mobile Roaming

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13 February 2024
Daniel Mayo

Revolut has just launched a new eSIM service for its UK customers, to allow them to avoid mobile roaming charges while travelling abroad. The service will allow its customers to use get easy access to mobile roaming in over 100 countries, with all customers able to use the eSIM to access the Revolut app while abroad. While customers on its top-end monthly plan will get 3GB of mobile data included, others will be able to top-up from within the app at what looks like competitive prices (certainly compared to roaming charges many UK customers face with their incumbent mobile operators).

This is an interesting move from several angles; not least in that it extends the concept of account bundling in banking from being a set of fixed packages to also include services with their own potential additional revenue streams, more akin to the ‘super-app’ concept than a bundle. It also demonstrates a strong customer-centric approach, addressing a clear customer pain point outside of financial services, which for many of its UK customers has become more acute since the country’s departure from the EU, and delivered through a seamless customer experience within its own app. This should be highly synergistic for Revolut, particularly given its use by many customers for making payments abroad.

From a technology perspective, this has certainly been enabled by developments on telco side, with the market’s increasing shift towards virtual over physical SIM cards (the Subscriber Identity Module used to identity and authentic mobile device users on a network). Most modern smartphones allow customers to switch between eSIM and physical SIM cards (for example all iPhone’s since the iPhone X support eSIM), which means customers don’t need to physically purchase and switch to new SIM cards when changing operators abroad. It is also supported by growth in number of global Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVMO). These are telco companies that lease wireless network infrastructure on a wholesale basis from telco companies that own the physical networks. In this case, Revolut is partnering with 1Global (formerly known as Truphone). Together, this means the Revolut can provide a fully digital service, where customers can use local operators at low prices and avoid roaming charges from their domestic provider, without having to find and purchase local SIM cards for each country they travel to.

For banks considering such partnerships, this also has significant technology and process implications as it shifts the bank from being just a reseller of a service within a bundle, to managing relationships, billing, and potentially even support for such third-party services. This is explored in more detail in Celent’s report Developing Next-Generation Retail Banking Pricing Strategies, which is well worth a read for institutions exploring such strategies.