Why Revolut built its own performance-first HR tech tool

Neobank Revolut was founded in London in 2015 with a mission to ‘simplify all things money’.

Fast forward a decade, Revolut has exceeded $2 billion in revenue, $400 million in net profit and 50 million customers across the world.

A key component of these impressive figures is Revout’s people – today the fintech employs more than 10,000 individuals globally – empowered by Revolut’s own, internally built HR tech tool: Revolut People.

Revolut People was launched five years ago to supercharge the fintech’s meritocratic culture and support the its HR team and employees.

A year on from Revolut selling the HR product externally to other businesses, UNLEASH exclusively sits down with Revolut’s Head of People Product Andrei Oprisor and Revolut’s Head of HR for Europe Luke Turner.

In the interview, we take a look under the hood of HR technology at the fintech, as well as find out why selling the tool to the enterprise market is next on Revolut’s to-do list.

Why Revolut People is the fintech’s HR secret sauce

Revolut takes a very meritocratic approach to work; “where the people who work the hardest, and put in the most amount of passion, get rewarded according to their effort”.

In this environment, performance is rewarded and “people feel like they can achieve pretty much whatever they want to achieve”. “People love having an impact and being recognized for it,” notes Oprisor.

“If you can solve those business problems, you can progress fast,” agrees Turner.

Both Turner and Oprisor have actually personally benefited from the fintech’s performance-first approach. Oprisor has been at Revolut for six years, he’s moved from software engineering to product management and now is the general manager for the HR tech product.

While Turner started at Revolut just nine months ago – he was a People Partner in the UK, and then within four months had moved into the Head of HR for Europe role.

Andrei Oprisor, Head of People Product, Revolut.

The issue was that it was “very difficult for us to find the toolset” to support Revolut’s meritocratic environment, states Oprisor.

Turner notes: “When you look at an external market, you’re more or less locked into what they’re offering”, and it can take a lot of time to “try and adjust that based on what the business needs.”

Therefore, the decision was made to “build a product that reflected the Revolut culture” and drove extraordinary outcomes.

Of course, the resulting product, Revolut People, has all the classic HR management components (whether that’s payroll, time and attendance, data storage, or access to employee documents), what makes it different from other tools is that it takes a performance-first approach to HR.

Revolut believes you “can’t create a culture if you do it once a quarter or once a year, you need to do it consistently over the course of the employee lifecycle”, continues Oprisor.

Underlying Revolut’s performance framework are three pillars: goals, skills, and values and behaviors.

Oprisor explains the aim is “having the right goals that have a high impact on the company, having the skill set to do your job to achieve those goals, and having the right behaviors and values that help you achieve those goals”.

“Everything was about goals being achieved – those goals are certain deliverables, certain metrics, that need to be” achieved. This means that all performance evaluations are based on hard data, rather than manager opinions.

By taking this three-fold approach, Revolut People aims to increase the proportion of high performers within the company, which in turns drives significantly higher productivity and better business bottom lines.

Oprisor is clear that these pillars apply not just to assessing the performance of existing employees, but also recruiting new employees through the tool.

UNLEASH was keen to find out the Revolut HR team’s experience of Revolut People.

Turner shares that it is “everything you need from a HRIS product”, notes Turner.

The main plus is that “can talk directly to the product team”, meaning problems can be solved quickly.

Plus, many things are customizable – this is particularly useful “when we expand into a different geography, it’s not as if we have to suddenly change the product or change what we’re doing”.

According to Oprisor, Revolut leveraged its experience from building fintech tools and adapted that to suite the unique data sensitivity needs that come with HR technology.

The company’s Data Protection and Security teams worked in partnership with the Product teams with the aim of ensuring Revolut People meets high standards of compliance.

From an in-house tool to commercializing Revolut People

At the end of 2023, Revolut moved from simply using Revolut People in-house to launching and selling it on the market.

“It was always the plan” to commercialize the tool, Oprisor tells UNLEASH.

We wanted to build a solution that doesn’t only help Revolut” – “we wanted to make sure that we help companies build dream teams” by supporting “meritocratic environment where people like working and maximize their performance”.

There was a plan to help “create an industry where people think performance-first when it comes to talent management”, explains Oprisor.

This is for HR, managers, but also employees – it is about helping them “to maximize their efficiency and help them reach their true potential”.

In addition, a few of Revolut’s former managers had moved on and were asking for access to Revolut People – they wanted to be able to use at their new companies.

Luke Turner, Head of HR, Europe, Revolut.

To date, more than 100 companies are using Revolut People. Examples include BlueLabs, Kittl, Techscale, and Cardino.

So far, “we’ve seen great results”, shares Oprisor. He claims that “nobody on the market can match” Revolut People’s approach.

The biggest impact is a higher percentage of high performers in company, which has a huge impact on business bottom lines.

Oprisor shares that some brands have seen a been a 36% in crease in talent density. Plus, attrition declined 9.7% and there’s been a 30% growth in the number of candidate applications.

Of course, by commercializing the product, Revolut is coming up against challenges it never had internally.

This meant when the product was first launched there was some frictions and challenges – but Oprisor and his team wanted to give their external clients the same level of input and personalization as Turner and the Revolut internal HR team had.

“The way we work with our customers is very similar to the way we work with our internal stakeholders – we have meeting once a week to get their feedback, and reply to their requests” – this process, Oprisor claims, is much faster than the other HR tech tools on the market.

The future of Revolut People

Now Revolut People is a year old as external HR tech tool, UNLEASH was keen to find out what the fintech has planned for the product.

Top of mind are continuing to launch new features – with AI top of mind. Revolut is exploring a chatbot assistant for the performance process, as well as also leveraging AI for meeting summarization and notetaking.

“If you’re a HR manager, a manager, an employee, [the assistant] should be there to assist you with the most important parts of your job”, adds Oprisor.

Plus, Oprisor and his team are focused on increasing not just the number of customers using the platform, but ensuring that those companies are bigger in size. Enterprise companies are very much Revolut People’s future target audience.

This because Revolut believes larger businesses often have a higher “appetite for performance management – they embrace this philosophy that we follow to deliver maximum impact”.

From a HR perspective, Turner shares that Revolut is focused on continuing to grow its global footprint, while keeping that employee experience top notch.

For Turner, “the tool that we’ve got, Revolut People, definitely provides that”.