Firstly, i’d like to say i’m very happy with my companies Revolut for Business account - we’ve mostly had a good experience with it and support is excellent!
Our business services a range of customers, some small some large. Small customers have no problem at all with our new bank details/IBAN and we’ve had great success receiving EUR/USD payments into the account.
However, we are running into repeat issues with our larger customers - these are the types of organisation with their own payments team, approval processes, “verified vendor” schemes, etc. Not a single one of these larger customers has been able to use our new bank details without us having seriously long verification processes.
The root cause of the problem (according to the customers) is that the IBAN for international payments is from a different country to our business (we are UK, IBAN is DK) and secondly that it does not verify with “popular” IBAN verification tools, where it fails with:
This BIC code is not listed in the SCL reachability directory, so we cannot report whether SEPA Direct Debit/B2B/COR1 are supported.
We’ve already got a letter from Revolut stating that we are indeed the owners of the bank account, however this is only useful after several days (in a few cases months) of wrangling.
I’ve taken the “issues” as far as possible with Revolut support, who say that the account details are valid and work, which is entirely 100% accurate.
My question is whether there are other businesses that have experienced the same issue with the Revolut account, and whether there are any suggestions to mitigate this type of “that isn’t your bank” response from our customers.
I cannot speak for the Revolut Business account since the current state isn’t appealing to me for many reasons, but this totally sounds like the usual problems with “new, Fintech stuff, new BICs” etc. in relation to accounting departmens of such bigger companies.
They use their own internal tools and processes with often rely on outdated stuff like not accepting out-of-country IBANs, outdated BIC databases in their financal tools etc.
Not sure if that’s the case here but there is hardly anything that Revolut can do if that is so.
Said companies/entities need to update their processes and databases, not ideal, but no way around it.
Actually one of the reasons why I still use two old-school brick and mortar banks for my freelancing stuff is because of those problems, also for example I have yet to encounter ANY “FinTech bank” to provide things like hand in direct debits etc (in, not out), but that’s another story.
==> If you feel like it, you need to continue talk to your customers and suppliers and make them aware of the problem being on their end. Otherwise you need to use an old school bank for those kind of customers if you don’t want to run into such problems.
MAYBE Revolut could help by making such companies aware from their end, but I don’t think the current state of Revolut staff allows for such lobby work.
Disclaimer: This totally may be a different problem here with Revolut. It just sounds 90% like the stuff I’ve encountered elsewhere over the last years, using many e-money/Fintech banks personally and professionally.
Thank you for taking the time to reply, I certainly agree with much of what you’ve said. We have eventually been able to work through the issues with these problem customers through a variety of additional security checks. If we come across one that won’t accept Revolut we will switch back to bricks and mortar for that particular customer.
My own understanding based on these discussions is that they are worried about sending money to a bank situated in a different country from the vendor, entirely due to auditing for anti-money laundering. No matter which way we cut it they are sending money to DK for a UK based vendor - and if i’m honest I can sort of understand where they are coming from on that basis.
If the UK IBAN accepted EUR/USD (without a payment reference) then i’m pretty sure we’d be set! Or perhaps there is some document somewhere that “proves” the way things work that can be wafted under the noses of such customers.
None of this is a deal breaker, we’re happy to work with things the way they are. We still have to negotiate with these organisations so that they don’t send us international cheques through the post and require blood samples as proof of receipt
