No one has ever accused Irish banks of being at the front of the queue when it comes to technology or, indeed, leading their customers into the banking world of the future more generally.<\/p>\n
It took them five years after the arrival of Revolut in the Irish market in 2015 to start working on a competitor to its instant payments services. The years since have been a story of false starts and frustration.<\/p>\n
Now Zippay, as it is called, is finally a reality. But are the domestic banks, as has been argued, simply too late to the party? <\/p>\n
Revolut assuredly has a huge head start, particularly among younger customers for whom instant payments is \u201cnormal\u201d, not \u201cnew\u201d and who have no particular loyalty to the established banks. <\/p>\n
Even among rival neobanks, the ubiquity of the term \u201cto Revolut\u201d in everyday language shows the uphill battle they face in challenging its dominance.<\/p>\n
But Zippay has its own inherent advantages.<\/p>\n
First, for all their weaknesses \u2013 especially in the digital world \u2013 most of the population still has an account with at least one of Bank of Ireland, AIB or PTSB. Zippay will appear automatically on the app that most of those customers will have been using over several years for online banking. <\/p>\n
Then there is the gnawing question of Revolut\u2019s record on security and customer service. <\/p>\n
UK consumer brand Which? reports that data exclusively obtained from the British financial ombudsman service shows that in each of the past two years, Revolut has been the financial service provider with the highest number of fraud and scam complaints lodged. <\/p>\n
The ability to speak to someone if and when things do go wrong \u2013 as against Revolut\u2019s chatbot \u2013 will also stand in Zippay\u2019s favour.<\/p>\n
As one reader puts it: \u201cThe failure of Revolut to respond effectively to scams means that I rarely keep more than \u20ac500 in that account… I\u2019ll be more likely to move to Zippay for transfers to friends and family, moving away from Revolut for security.\u201d <\/p>\n
Revolut is certain to retain a significant presence in the instant payments market but it may, for the first time, face real competition as it looks to establish a broader banking presence in the State. To \u201czip\u201d, anyone?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"No one has ever accused Irish banks of being at the front of the queue when it comes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":362177,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[6572,61,60,202,8581,80,154616],"class_list":["post-362176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mobile","tag-cantillon","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-mobile","tag-revolut","tag-technology","tag-zippay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=362176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362176\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/362177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=362176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=362176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=362176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}