By Sarah Renehan

The online platform Revolut, with an Irish customer base of three million people is finally
faced with a worthy rival in the Irish market, with the announcement of a new market entrant called
“Zippay”. Zippay, a feature being added to AIB, Bank of Ireland and Permanent TSB’s online
banking apps, will allow customers to send, request, and spilt payments with other users
without the use of third-party applications. Zippay may be seen as directly challenging the
long established success of Revolut, but will such a feature take off or have the traditional
Irish banks left it too late to reclaim the instant transfer market segment?

What Makes Revolut So Successful?
Launched over 10 years ago as a fintech startup, Revolut was co-founded by Nikolay
Stornosky and Vlad Yatsenko, and has a current valuation of $75bn as of September 2025.
The platform began with the promise of transparent currency exchange and is now used by
individuals across 160 countries and regions worldwide. It’s feature of instant payment transfers,
with no sending fees amongst Revolut users, has revolutionized the online banking space. Since
its original launch, it as expanded into other markets, including insurance and savings
accounts with competitive rates of AER. Revolut adapts quickly to market changes, in 2018
becoming the first European fintech app to offer cryptocurrency trading for the likes of Bitcoin
and Litecoin, and over 10 million users have traded £45 billion since 2017.

Can Traditional Banks Compete?
Since Revolut’s establishment as a fully-fledged digital banking platform, traditional banks
have lagged behind by failing to launch competing features, ultimately hindering their
opportunity to gain a share in this new market. Zippay will only challenge one aspect of the
Revolut model, arguably the most used aspect of the model; the instant transfer
function. Despite the delay in action, Zippay has showcased potential to disrupt the market.
It will service 5 million potential Irish customers across the three banks, AIB, BOI, and
Permanent TSB, and will be backed by the perceived security that these banks offer.

Interestingly, the EU recently introduced legislation making SEPA Instant Payments
mandatory for all EU Payment Service Providers from the 9th of October 2025. This is a
system for making cashless payments which is used across the EU, a legislation which will allow banking customers to make instant transfers using IBANs; transfers which
previously took up to one business day, will now take moments. Ironically,  Zippay is built
on the previous SEPA payment system and not the SEPA instant payment system. This is due
to Zippay being built long before the announcement of this new legislation.

The slow response of the Irish banks in creating a rival has made their new platform feature
somewhat redundant even before its initial launch. As online banking users are now able to
send instant payments with SEPA through the use of IBANs, the convenience of instant payments is lost, and instead Zippay’s success relies on the convenience of allowing users to send money with just a phone number.
However, there are certainly some obstacles to the usage of this platform which may inconvenience users, with an example being Zippay’s sending limit of 1000 EUR per day, which is also dependent on individual bank transaction limits. Meanwhile, Revolut sees no funds transfer limit. Moving forward, it will be interesting to see how Zippay can compete with “Revolut Junior” a service which allows parents to open
accounts for their children which only they can deposit money into. This has proven to be
extremely popular, with over 400,000 of Revolut’s Irish customer base being under 18 years
of age.

Will the Delayed Response be Zippay’s Downfall?
In terms of business strategy, the traditional Irish banks may have left
joining the instant payments trend too late. In Eisenhardt & Martins article “Dynamic Capabilities:
What are They?” (2000), the idea of fast-moving markets and how a firm’s ability to sense,
seize, and reconfigure matters more than static advantage, and this theory can be applied in
the case of the Irish banks. Although the traditional banks offer high levels of security and
protection, and the new services which Zippay seeks to provide will eliminate the need for
topping up a digital wallet or downloading a separate app, they still lag behind their
competitors. In 2020, Irish banks attempted to launch a similar venture called “Yippay”,
and though it had never launched due to legislative restrictions and software issues, the concept of Yippay could have potentially offered a more adequate and timely rival to Revolut.

Ultimately only time will tell, we must wait until the 2026 launch of Zippay to truly gauge its
success. The odds, however, are not in it’s favour.