James Gibson, Revolut Business General Manager, speaks to us about finance in business and how organisations can save costs.
Businesses today are faced with increasingly difficult decisions as they try – quite literally – to keep the lights on.
Spend data from Revolut Business customers shows the uncertainty is causing companies to adapt, driven by a need to minimise overheads and in part by the technological solutions now available to support a more streamlined and remote approach to doing business.
Spending patterns of tens of thousands of Revolut SME customers show that businesses globally are spending far less (20%) on advertising than this time last year. Software subscriptions, however, have seen an uptick (13%).
For larger businesses – companies with more than five active cards in use – this rises to an increase of 30% in subscription spend. Spend on advertising drops by almost 10%.
Businesses in the UK have cut more than a third (23%) of their advertising budget since last year, while software subscription spend has crept up by 8%. In the US, while advertising spend has dropped by 19%, software spend has risen by a staggering 165%. Markets like Spain sit somewhere in between, seeing a 34% drop and 67% rise respectively.
Businesses are now investing in products and platforms that can help their employees work remotely and become more efficient, rather than on advertising campaigns. Instead of projecting outwards, businesses are facing inwards: looking at internal processes and practices that could be improved or optimised.
The subscription products that have seen the largest increase in spend are instant messaging programmes and project management tools.
Along with the spending trends of its existing customers, evidence in the demand for Revolut Business shows an appetite from organisations to seek out new ways to monitor their spend and save money as the cost of doing business rises. Today, Revolut Business is welcoming more than 6,000 new businesses and issuing 60,000 new cards every month. Since launching in 2017, Revolut Business has processed more than £100 billion in transactions and calls ecommerce and fast-growth SMEs among its hundreds of thousands of business customers.
One of the reasons businesses are choosing to move to Revolut Business is its ability to offer a simple, clear way of understanding exactly how your business has been spending over time, what it means and – crucially – how you can plan for the future. The analytics functionality is just one part of a growing set of spend management tools used by Revolut Business customers worldwide.