No, this is just Revolut’s incompetence. Whatever they do with the reference text is their own business.
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And Revolut seems to not have any concept about character sets ourside of plain ASCII used in the English speaking world.
Take the name they print on the card. I’ve never seen a card company in Switzerland that replaced the ü character with an u character but always emboss/print it as ue. Which makes perfect sense in the German speaking world. And that’s only one example, I’m quite sure other languages face similar challenges.
It’s simply not well designed. For a company to request from it’s user base to enter umlaut characters in a field which is not fit for purpose for this is a failure on their end not on the users end.
Then they should learn from the Swiss bank how names coming in are matched against the registered name. Swiss banks are used to treat ü the same as ue and know that it does not make any sense to reject a payment with ue in it’s name even if they have ü registered in the master data.
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I had no issues at all. I just got an transfer on my own with the new details. My name has an ü in it. I just made the transfer as revolut requested with the three lines. Everything worked perfectly. It could be that my bank NAB can handle ü without Issues. They using the same bank system as CS. I think there is an issue if other banks will change the ü to something else. Then it does not match.
Try typing the reference in a text application and then do copy and paste in the swift reference system. It worked for me.
Mike, I know (I’m Swiss as well 
), but I think the compliance situation when an account is used as a “passthrough” to credit another account may be different than if you were just paying bills. For instance, on the old payslips, when you do a transfer to anything else than a PostFinance account, you specify a “transfer to” a PostFinance account of target bank X “for beneficiary” Y, which must then be mentioned with full name and address - just putting Y’s bank account number in the reference number field will likely not work.
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I know what you’re refering to, but that’s also possible with a wire-transfer (Banküberweisung).
I also understand the details requiring some additional information as it’s “pay to Credit-Suisse, receipient: revolut”, BUT:
is there a reason why the reference-number isn’t sufficient to allocate the sent money?
Answer: maybe. Because it’s just “a number”, and typos - especially when entered in a cellphone-app - happen very fast.
The solution though isn’t “enter commas, which isn’t always supported”, or “enter several lines”, especially, since the “local topup” is only an option for people living in switzerland, not “enter the country-code of the account owner”.
But a unique alpha-numeric sequence. IN ONE LINE, without “special characters”.
(@anon33247966 and all the other 
- officials: feel free to use following lines as feedback and solution to the issue!)
Eg. a mix between “customer-number”, initials and some random-values. eg. “12345 AbCd 12rd” (dashes or blanks are supported, ask credit suisse if need be). The sequence shouldn’t be overly complicated or too long but easy, and as small as possible - yet unique and set up so that no sequence matches the other; so only payments who do NOT match the number get rejected, and a typo doesn’t lead to a missallocation of funds.
Edit: and as revolut atm is no alternative to swiss banks (salarys can’t be paied to revolut as they require accounts that “belong to the receipient” and not some 3rdparty), it couldn’t harm to make the “local transfer” “from the account-owner himself only”, as in “revolut-accountholders address must match the details of the money-sender”…
OR, to be honest, several banks in CH are handing out personal CH-IBANs. maybe THAT would be the easier way to go for all in the long run after all, solving all kinds of issues…?
It should just be a longer reference number. This is a well-known problem with many solutions available for decades:
- No case sensitivity
- No error-prone characters like capital i / small L, zero / capital o etc.
- Spaces just for easy reading, not required/checked
- Copy and export functionality (e.g. send to profile email address) so people don’t even have to type in the number
- Respect common character limits, 20 characters
- Number of lines doesn’t matter, characters are just concatenated before checking
Looks something like:
AQ12B P9ZF2 3MNY5
(and aq12BP9zf23mny5 would also be correct)
With that scheme: assuming Revolut has 100 mio. customers with reference numbers, 1 mio. transactions with faulty numbers would still result in less than 1/million chance that even one transaction out of that million goes to a wrong account.
Edit: for me the only explanation for this change is that some “manager” who doesn’t understand anything about math decided to not trust things he/she doesn’t understand and thus the name has to be added for no reason except that he/she can grasp that concept whereas randomness of numbers are above their head.
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It actually makes sense to add more details to be checked to verify that the transfer was actually intended for that user.
The way it is implemented is a middle way between usability (it’s easier for a person to type a name than a random series of alphanumeric characters) and less faulty assigned funds.
Overall my guess would be that this leads to more rejected payments at first and less manual work to correctly assign funds.
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It would only make sense if the redundant information was used for manual error correction. But they don’t do that. Instead it adds more complexity and more possible errors. So, no, it does not make any sense at all.
There is no usability now. Having to enter multiple lines and special characters is much more complicated than copy/pasting a single number with flexible error correction. And as I explained above, “faulty assigned funds” does not happen with a correct scheme.
The issue with this otherwhise good idea is:
- too complicated to enter by phone (keep it simple)
- we are not talking about the whole revolut-customer-base, but only about swiss customers who have to use a swiss based collective-account (what’s the correct translation again?) to top-up their account with CHF…
Even in the best-case scenario and Revolut having 8.2million customers in Switzerland, your approach would be far too complicated to solve an issue like this…
It will lead to more rejected payments, as there will be no manual work to check things… (pretty sure revolut’s troubleshooters have enough work to do without the “let’s complicate things by not thinking them through”-action here 
So if there’ll be a mismatch in the reference, it will lead to a reject.
(btw - did the neon-payment without seperte lines go through?)
Umm wait. “AQ12B P9ZF2 3MNY5” (case insensitive) is too complicated? But “12345 AbCd 12rd” is not? 
You do realize that the IBAN already has to be entered, right? BTW, when you tap on the reference it is copied to the clipboard already.
I think everyone would benefit from a “send details to my email” button on the account page. Tap it and you’ll receive an email with the IBAN, BIC, reference number etc. that you can easily copy/paste on the desktop. It is in Revolut’s interest that people don’t top up by credit card, not just Swiss users.
edit: just realized there’s an export button on the screen. not the best usability, but it’s there.
Just enter the numbers using your cellphone’s onscreen-keyboard, and you’ll know 
My bank does not allow commas in the reference field and it is also one line maximum 16 characters. So I have no possibility to enter the three lines separated by commas. The bank confimed that this is the case and naturally, they are not going to make any changes.
Any suggestions anyone?
Any ideas how to get around this? Revolut
so just to recap:
0% fees on top ups with:
- ubs credit cards
- migros credit card
- postfinance credit card
- all cards emitted by Swisscards
up to 3% fees with other swiss cards> Blockquote
Marcolino,
Could you confirm that it is the case with UBS Credit Card top up on a CHF Revolut account which has a “GB” IBAN (french customer) ?
Thanks,
Fly
You are using the wrong kind of transfer.
The one you need is a regular bank to bank transfer not a payment with reference number.
No, it is the correct IBAN to IBAN type of tranfer. There is simply not the possibility to enter the data as required by Revolut because the Reference field is one line, maximum 16 characters and no commas allowed.
What bank do you use?
So, do you need to use spaces as well or just commas? I.e. would the syntax be something like unique,name,CH or unique, name, CH?
I just used comas, only between firsname and lastname I had a space.
xxxxxxxx,Firstname Lastname,CH
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