On the last day of second class, my mother gave Mrs Kelly a casserole dish. Now the end of term is marked by a Revolut link in the second class WhatsApp group, showing us where to direct funds for the teacher’s gift. I click on it in bed, wondering how much to send. Another parent has already wondered the same thing.
“Just give whatever you feel like,” says the saintly mother in charge of the whip-round, adding a smiley face for good measure. I’m thinking maybe €10, before someone writes that when she was the treasurer, the average contribution was €15. She checked. I open my Revolut and send €15, then count the SNAs and immediately think I should have sent €20. This is the thing about digital payments. They make giving money easier. They don’t make it any less complicated.
Easy transacting is one way to understand Revolut’s huge success in Ireland. According to recent figures, the app now has about 3.4 million Irish users, more than 80 per cent of the adult population, so ubiquitous it’s become a verb for electronic payments. A recent FT think piece says “it is in Ireland that Revolut has had the greatest success in seizing market share from rivals old and new” and attributes its rapid rise to the “pace and opportunism” of the tech start-up. But Revolut’s success i here isn’t just a story about a fintech company beating slow-moving competitors (though Irish banks have surely done their bit). Revolut put down roots because it plugged into something older and more intimate than banking: the social life of money.
The expression “he still has his communion money” largely sums it up. It tells us that far from being just a unit of account or means of exchange, money in Ireland means lots of things. With small shifts in tone or context, it can be a gift, a bribe, an indulgence, or a ritual. I’d argue that in the same way Irish social skills skew to what’s left unsaid more than bold assertion, our relationship to money is all about making the money disappear.
Irish money culture is full of transactions that pretend they aren’t really transactions at all, but which show up as generosity, friendship, charity, or just doing the right thing. We’re exquisitely tuned to the meanings of a tenner in a card, a gift repaid too early or a round bought too late, someone “forgetting” to Revolut you, someone giving too little to the collection, someone brushing off an offer to pay with “you’re grand” in a way that implies you absolutely are not grand. When we get it wrong, it’s mortifying.
Irish attitudes to money are not the opposite of calculation. It’s all about a socially approved way of balancing the ledger without admitting that the ledger exists
My son Ted missed most of junior infants because of illness. He joined his class in December for a joint birthday party with a few of his classmates. He stood a little off to the side of the line-up and smiled shyly through a rendition of Happy Birthday. As if at some invisible signal, the children all began to bring out little white envelopes which they thrust into my son’s hands. “How nice,” I thought, picturing handmade drawings.
It was only later when we got home and opened them that we saw what they were – birthday cards from every member of his class, each with a €5 note tucked inside. I’m now well used to driving from shop to shop in search of small notes in advance of one of these joint birthday parties, but on that day I was clueless. As Ted writhed with indecent glee in a pile of fivers, I writhed with embarrassment; here was a social ritual that every parent in my son’s class seemed to know without saying it aloud or needing to be told. Everyone, that is, except me and my husband.
[ Revolut to refund thousands of Irish customers after ATM charge errorOpens in new window ]
Irish attitudes to money are not the opposite of calculation. It’s all about a socially approved way of balancing the ledger without admitting that the ledger exists. Payments apps are successful, then, not just because they’re fast or frictionless, but when they fit a particular culture’s norms around money. In Ireland, Revolut does two things at once. It makes money easier to send, but it also makes the underlying social debt just visible enough.
In the Netherlands, apps like Tikkie thrive because they formalise quick settlement in a culture where bill-splitting is the norm. In China, WeChat Pay’s digital red envelopes folded norms around gifting, luck and reciprocity into platform design. In Kenya, M-Pesa built mobile money on local networks, recruiting trusted members of a community to act as cash-in and cash-out points in the absence of banking infrastructure.
On the darker side of digital finance, predatory digital lending apps in Kenya and Nigeria have exploited a culture of shame around debt, accessing borrowers’ contact lists and threatening to inform friends and family if loans are not repaid. In Germany, where privacy and cash are both highly valued, Revolut has had far less traction.
This morning, I sent money to my friend Jeremiah because he’s going to buy our kids lunch after school. Often, I wouldn’t do this because we’re in a friendship where minding and feeding each other’s children is routine. I was careful then in how I marked it out, not paying Jeremiah back but sending money for Ted via an adult, a quick “Ted’s lunch fund” message, a few silly emojis of a sandwich and a milkshake to soften the edges. A small transaction that barely feels like a transaction at all. Just visible enough. A ledger I carried in my head now lives on a tab in my phone.
Payment apps fit into existing norms around money, but they also subtly shift them. I notice how “I’ll get you next time” has shifted more to “I’ll Revolut you”. I wonder if it changes how we, as a culture, balance the ledger. We were keeping tabs anyway, right?
