Revolut is building a signature scent. Here is what that tells you about the future of fintech branding in Europe.
Revolut is looking for a scent branding agency. And honestly? Of course they are.
Because it makes complete sense when you zoom out. Revolut has opened its first physical store. They are building out airport lounges. They have 50 million retail customers and they are pushing hard into mainstream consumer life. When you are doing all of that, you need a recognisable sight, sound, touch and smell. You need people to feel something when they encounter your brand, not just when they open the app.
If you have spent any time thinking about brand loyalty in consumer finance, this move is not surprising. It is overdue. And it tells you something uncomfortable about where most European fintechs are right now.
The app is not a brand. It is a product.
Here is a pattern I have watched repeat itself across the European fintech market for the past decade. A company builds a beautiful app. Clean UI (user interface), fast onboarding, sharp card design. They run performance marketing, maybe some out-of-home advertising, and they call the combination of those things their brand. Then they wonder why retention is soft, why NPS (Net Promoter Score) is flat, why users treat them like a utility rather than a company they feel something for.
The app is not the brand. The app is the product. Brand is what happens in the gap between interactions, when the customer is not looking at a screen. It is what they feel when they think about you, what they say when someone asks them which card they use, what they reach for first. That is a different problem from product design, and most fintechs have not seriously started solving it.
At the scale Revolut is operating at, the marginal gain from another UX (user experience) iteration is smaller than the gain from making customers feel something that no competitor can replicate. A scent is sticky in the most literal sense of the word. It is processed in the limbic system, the part of the brain that governs emotion and memory, before any consciou
