Revolut is opening up its data and machine learning tools to employees across the business, following the roll-out of a new analytics dashboard.

Following a six-month trial, UK-based digital banking platform signed a deal with Exasol to provide a cloud-based central data repository and data management platform, available to all employees - from data scientists to frontline service and HR staff - with gradations of access depending on the sensitivity of customer and commercial data.

The platform allows the FinTech’s data scientists to build advanced functionality, such as machine learning algorithms to analyse large data sets and help its employees detect fraud, improve customer satisfaction and financial reporting.

Abhi Thanendran, lead data scientist at Revolut, told FStech the goal at Revolut is to back every single team’s decisions with data. “If you want an analytic database you would need hundreds of engineers, but with Exasol it’s already made, which gives us more control over where the data is shared and how it is accessed.”

Employees will have access to their permitted data streams via a dashboard, while the advanced data processing will improve Revolut’s overall customer scoring algorithms, which Thanendran said were helpful in assessing customer’s suitability for additional financial products and services.

Revolut, which has more than two million app users, initiated the data repository upgrade as it looks to scale up operations. Founded in 2015 in the UK, the company is in the process of expanding its operations to the US and has ambitions to build its customer base in Asia and beyond.

Thanendran said: “Because we’re growing so fast, and there’s a lot of structural change in the company, running big data queries is just not feasible.”

He explained that the company was in its first stage of setting up its office in New York, with a view to future operations in Australia and Singapore.

“We want to be more than banking,” he said, explaining that Revolut has ambitions to become the Amazon of the financial services world, with a particular focus on providing “borderless” digital wallets for a new generation of ex-pats and global customers.

Thanendran said that agile adoption of new technologies and digital scale-up capacity has given an upper hand over legacy financial institutions, which often struggle to keep up with the pace of change in financial technology, explaining that Revolut’s approach is to “automate everything from the start”.

“It’s very hard for them to adopt a new thing,” Thanendran explained, “If it takes them three months to adopt something they are already behind by the time it goes live.”

Share Story: