London fintech startup Revolut is raising £10 million and signing 1,500 new customers a day

Revolut, a London fintech startup that lets vacationers spend money abroad on plastic without running up FX fees, is in the process of raising £10 million.

CEO and founder Nikolay Storonsky told to BI that the 10-month-old startup is currently raising its Series A funding round: "We hope to close very soon we've already had a few offers from investors, it's just a question of getting the right price and the right investors. We will be raising £10 million."

Revolut is an app linked to a pre-paid MasterCard. It lets people load money from their domestic bank account and then spend in over 90 currencies around the world at the so-called interbank rate, the best exchange rate available with no fees.

Usually, FX brokers sell customers money below the interbank rate, making their money through fees and the difference they buy and sell at. But Revolut plans to use alternative revenue streams, such as marketing to consumers through its app. However, it did recently introduce a "fair usage" clauses that charge some fees above certain thresholds, such as a 2% levy on ATM withdrawals above £500 a month.

Russian-born Storonsky had the idea when working as a derivatives trader, first at Lehman Brothers then at Credit Suisse. He told BI: "I was a very frequent traveller. One of my problems was I spent a lot of money on FX fees so I decided to create a product that dealt with my personal pain."

Since launching last July, Revolut has signed up 160,000 customers, Storonsky said. "We're already, I think, the fastest growing fintech company in Europe," he told BI. "We are getting about 1,500 new customers a day."

The last publicly released users figure from Revolut was 100,000 in February. At that time, the startup said it had already processed $200 million worth of transactions.

Revolut has to date raised $7 million. Early "seed" investors include two of London's most revered venture capital offices: Balderton Capital, which has backed the likes of Betfair, Zopa, and LoveFilm; and Index Ventures, backers of TransferWise, Facebook, and Dropbox.

Revolut is one of a number of fintech - financial technology - startups raising money around a card linked to a mobile app. Others include student money management app Loot, which is close to announcing its seed funding round, and Curve, an all-in-one card that has raised money from TransferWise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus, the co-founders of money transfer app Azimo, and Betfair cofounder Ed Wray.

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