Fintechs, long known for shaking up foreign exchange and borderless banking, are now selling mobile phone plans, lifestyle subscriptions and daily utilities. Notably Revolut offers a mobile plan in it’s “Ultra” tier – less a telecom offering than a lifestyle perk designed to entice, retain and deepen loyalty in their customers.
At first glance, it might seem like little more than a clever value-add. But this move isn’t about entering telecom. It’s about owning more of their customers’ daily life. It’s about loyalty.
For traditional banks, often too challenged by legacy systems to provide similar programs this should serve as a wake-up call.
From Points to Platforms: Loyalty Has Evolved
or decades, loyalty in banking meant one thing: points. Earn them when you swipe your credit card. Spend them on yet another gift card before they expire.
That playbook, while once effective, no longer matches how consumers engage with financial services today. It’s transactional, limited, and increasingly disconnected from modern customer behavior.
What Revolut—and a rising class of fintech super-apps like N26, Nubank and Step—have recognized is that loyalty isn’t earned through rewards. It’s earned through relevance. When you’re the app that helps someone split rent, trade crypto, buy stocks, and now manage their mobile data plan—you’re not just useful. You’re indispensable.
This is whole customer loyalty: not earned with prizes, but embedded into daily life.
What Revolut Is Doing—and Why It Matters
The Bundling Strategy Behind Fintech Loyalty
Revolut’s mobile plans are just one example that is part of a broader bundling strategy. These fintechs have already collapsed the boundaries between banking, investing, crypto, travel, and now telco – offering a single, seamless lifestyle platform. The more a customer does in the app, the more friction there is to leave.
This is about deepening relationships with your customers to the point where they’ve planted roots and have no desire to look elsewhere. It’s about whole customer loyalty.
Daily Relevance = Customer Stickiness
While traditional banks fight over savings rates and credit card rewards, fintechs like Revolut are competing for daily attention. When your banking app is also your phone carrier, your currency converter, your airport lounge pass, and your stockbroker, it becomes your digital companion.
It’s no longer a financial app. It’s an ecosystem.
Loyalty as Lifestyle, Not Reward
The loyalty strategies of fintechs like Revolut are not just clever—they’re structural. Here’s how they are driving lasting stickiness:
- Lifestyle bundling: By integrating lifestyle services like mobile data, fintechs like Revolut cement themselves as part of a customer’s routine.
- Utility over incentives: Customers don’t stay because of bonus points. They stay because everything they need is in one place.
- Passive retention: Instead of bribing customers to stay, they make leaving feel like a downgrade.
In contrast, many traditional banks are still heavily anchored in credit-card based rewards, without recognizing or rewarding broader customer relationships. There’s no incentive to stay if all the value is in one product.
The Hidden Risk: Disintermediation
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: if banks don’t evolve, they risk being reduced to infrastructure.
Fintechs are increasingly owning the customer relationship, while traditional banks fade into the background. Wealth platforms, loan marketplaces, even tax prep apps are now offering embedded financial services—leaving legacy banks to compete on rates, not relationships.
In this environment, being “the bank behind the app” may mean losing brand visibility, customer loyalty, and ultimately, margin.
The Big Question for Banks: What Now?
To compete in this new loyalty landscape, banks have two strategic paths
- Embed lifestyle services to mirror super-app utility
- Deeply personalize banking to become the trusted financial guide
Both require one thing: a modular, agile platform.
Banks must be able to experiment, launch, and scale new bundles and offers—without rewriting their core systems. They must be able to tier customers based on holistic behavior (not just card swipes) and deliver cross-product experiences that feel cohesive and earned.
At banks burdened by tech constraints and budget concerns, this change can feel daunting. But it doesn’t have to.
Zafin: Enabling Loyalty by Design
Zafin empowers traditional banks to build loyalty into their platform—not patch it on top.
Here’s how:
- Modular Tiering & Offer Logic
Design loyalty tiers that account for a customer’s full relationship—mortgages, savings, wealth, credit, and beyond. - Smart Bundling Capabilities
Combine products, features, or lifestyle services into cohesive bundles that make switching unthinkable. - Decoupled Architecture
Zafin integrates with legacy systems without being constrained by them. Banks can innovate at the loyalty layer without rewriting the core. - Ecosystem-Ready
Plug into external partners (like mobile services or insurance) to create modern bundles that go beyond banking.
In other words, Zafin enables banks to compete not just on products—but on platform experience.
Build Loyalty That Lasts with Zafin
The reason fintechs are moving into mobile plans isn’t about telco. It’s a signal that the battleground for loyalty has moved.
Traditional banks must take note. Loyalty can no longer be something you reward. It must be something you design. And design demands agility, modularity, and platform thinking.
Zafin helps banks transform loyalty from a fading afterthought into a strategic growth driver. Let’s build the next generation of customer relevance—together.
Ready to modernize loyalty?
Learn how Zafin helps banks design loyalty that matters more—and lasts longer.
