Revolut

Revolut, in common with traditional financial institutions, uses algorithms to identify money laundering, fraud and other criminal activity, but unlike the rest of the banking industry, Revolut's algorithms additionally trigger an automated suspension of accounts. Revolut explains that "the system is programmed to temporarily lock an account and place it in a queue, until one of our compliance agents can review the case".[33]

It is increasingly reported that Revolut's algorithms suspend a growing number of accounts in error for weeks or months at a time because Revolut does not have sufficient compliance agents to review the automated suspensions, and that while Revolut pays no interest on the large suspended balances, Revolut can earn interest on the funds in wholesale money markets. Customers whose accounts are suspended are blocked from contacting Revolut's usual support channel and instead receive automated responses from a chatbot.[34][35][36] The Daily Telegraph reported that Revolut suspended an account containing £90,000 for more than two months[37] and that another customer travelled 500 miles from Auvergne in France to Revolut's London offices in an unsuccessful attempt to recover £15,000 in an account that Revolut had similarly frozen without any justification being given.[38] In a further case reported by The Times, Revolut suspended and subsequently closed a business account containing €300,000 belonging to Priorité Energie, which "helps low-income families in Paris to insulate their homes under a government initiative", preventing the company from paying its staff.[39]

According to Finews.com, Revolut's public internet forums contain almost 500 complaints by customers about locked accounts and a lack of response from Revolut's support team.[40] Many customers in each forum thread report a total loss of access to their money.[41][42][43][44][45][46][47] Finews also reported that Revolut asked a customer to provide to Revolut her tax statement and subsequently tax statements of people who had sent her small amounts of money, and that when she failed to provide the tax statements of those third parties, Revolut blocked her account without giving due notice.

In March 2019, Wired published an exposé of the company's employment practices and work culture. This found evidence of unpaid work, high staff turnover and employees being ordered to work weekends to meet performance indicators.[48] A later article in December 2019 by Sifted noted that Revolut had a higher rating than its peers on Glassdoor.[49]

In June 2020, Wired published a further exposé of Revolut's dismissal of employees during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which employees, particularly in Kraków, were given the choice of being terminated for underperformance or a mutual agreement to leave the company voluntarily, in order to reduce the headline number of 62 redundancies announced by Revolut. The report explained that "Current and former Revolut employees say staff were coerced into accepting terminations, even though the company had no legal grounds to fire them" and that employees in Porto were pressured into agreeing to a salary sacrifice scheme in order to keep their jobs.[50] According to Wired, in a message sent to the 495-strong customer support team on Slack shortly after the salary sacrifice scheme was announced, head of support Inna Grynova urged them to participate:

“So far, almost 20 per cent of our employees globally have submitted their sacrifices. In Support we’ve gathered only 44 submitions [sic] (out of 495 employees) which is a very small number. Our goal is to use SSS as an alternative to the need of employees redundancy and other cost cuts. So the success of SSS depends on all of us. If it won’t be enough, unfortunately we would need to go for the other steps, which we’ll try to avoid. The positive impact of SSS can be achieved only when we work together.”