Revolut: Bank with benefits
2024 was a bonanza of a year for Revolut, the perky little arriviste that is still enjoying the title of Europe’s most valuable start-up as it grows to a scale that puts many a legacy bank to shame.
Gaining a banking licence in its home market of the UK, hitting 50-million customers and raising money at a valuation of $45bn suggest that the fintech is quite a long way out of nappies, as it more than doubled profits to £1bn after revenues grew from £1.8bn to £3.1bn.
Many customers started using Revolut because it was super easy to open an account, the app was highly user-friendly and it was very cheap to send money and transfer currencies at decent rates, so it was a no-brainer as a secondary card that would be useful on holiday.
One of its challenges has been to persuade customers to ditch their old-school banks and use Revolut as a primary account, and this looks more viable now that it has beefed up in scale and added a broad range of extra features.
It still offers a free standard account, but if you splash out on its top-of-the-range Ultra plan you can expect about £5,000 in annual benefits that sound as though it is heading towards private banking territory.
You can earn RevPoints on your spending, get free data globally and access to airport lounges, not to mention subscriptions to the likes of the Financial Times, Headspace and even the delights of Tinder Gold. No wonder revenues from its premium subscription offerings were up 74% in the year to £423m.
Nissan: Rough roads ahead
The impact of US President Donald Trump’s “liberation day” promises to be difficult to negotiate if you’re an automaker in rude financial health, but if you’re already tottering on the brink of doom after years of wretched performance, then it could be time to call in the undertakers.
Historians of the motor industry may hark back to the glory days of Carlos Ghosn’s “Nissan Revival Plan”, which drove the company to record profits in one of the most spectacular corporate turnarounds ever recorded, but that was a while ago.
More recently Ghosn is better known for skipping bail in Japan in 2019 by taking a late-night flight in a private jet inside a large box marked as audio equipment, and the company he once headed has suffered a similar fall from grace.
Nissan has had to announce that it is expecting a loss of about $5.3bn for the year, the largest in its history, as it scrambles to slash global production capacity and the size of its workforce to mitigate the impact of sales falling off a cliff.
Sales fell from 5.5-million vehicles in 2018 to an expected 3.3-million last year, for the simple reason that there’s no particularly compelling reason to buy one, especially given the company’s precarious financial position.
It needs to find itself a partner without delay, after talks with Honda broke down earlier this year when it became clear that Honda was viewing Nissan as a potential subsidiary rather than an equal partner.
The problem is that there will inevitably be a whiff of desperation about its search, which is never a great approach to a suitor.
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