How Revolut’s multi-currency feature reshaped banking

James Gibson left management consulting to join Revolut in 2017 after seeing a 2016 demonstration of an app that let users hold and exchange multiple currencies in a single account. He studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford and spent five years at Oliver Wyman advising European organisations on digital transformation.

He began at Revolut in business development, later moving into product work. He now leads Revolut Business. Gibson recalled that consulting provided formal training and clear processes, while the company he joined was smaller and focused on rapid product delivery and learning by doing.

Gibson pointed to concrete changes in how companies handle finance. Business registration, account opening, cross-border payments and expense management can now be completed online and often within a day. These processes replaced paper forms, branch visits and long waits that previously delayed operations.

On technology trends, he highlighted the impact of generative artificial intelligence. He wrote that AI tools have lowered the technical barriers to building software, allowing an individual to move from concept to a working prototype in days instead of months. He noted the tools change quickly and that many experiments will fail, while also enabling more people to test and build products.

He described how automation and integrated financial systems have made capabilities once limited to large firms available to smaller businesses. Routine bookkeeping and manual reconciliation are increasingly handled by software, which shifts staff time toward customer service or product development tasks.

Gibson recalled the 2016 moment when he first saw seamless multi-currency transfers and noted similar features are now common in business banking. He wrote, “Technology is not valuable because it is new. It is valuable because it changes what people are able to do.”