The inspiration for this article came from an advert I was forced to watch on YouTube this morning. It was an advert that I couldn’t skip, and it was selling me the benefits of the Revolut Matal Card – the benefits appeared to be purely aspirational, and the one that caught my attention was the subscription to the Financial Times!
Revolut’s Metal Cards and the Marketing of Aspiration
Don’t you think the term “Innovation” is one of those words that has been worn so thin by overuse that it’s hard to know what it means anymore.
In the tech industry, in finance, and in consumer products, “innovation” is deployed like a magic wand. If you sprinkle the word on a press release or a product launch, suddenly the ordinary becomes extraordinary, a software update becomes an innovation, and a new logo is hot news.
Re-packaging something that already exists is suddenly framed as progress.
But if we pause for a moment and ask what innovation really is, we might reach for something closer to the dictionary definition: the introduction of new ideas, new methods, or new products that change the way we live and work.
True innovation has an element of disruption to it, shifting the trajectory of an industry, or sometimes of society itself.
Now let’s look at how companies use the word – when they call something “innovative,” what they usually mean is “marketable.” They are not necessarily introducing a radical new way of solving a problem, they are introducing a fresh way of making you feel about the solution you already have, and what better example than the industry’s current penchant for metal cards.
The Weight of Aspiration
Revolut is a UK-based fintech that has grown into a global player, making headlines when it introduced its premium metal cards – emphasis on “premium”. For those not familiar with the nature of the product, these cards are literally made of metal. They are heavier in the hand, apparently sleeker in the wallet, and presented with a level of ceremony that makes opening the package feel more like buying jewellery than receiving a payment instrument.
According to an industry source, Revolut are now looking to develop the metal card – along with its aspirational and paid premium services – until it accounts for around 10% of the issued card book.
But here’s the thing, when you put the card into action, it does nothing more than a standard piece of plastic! You can tap it, swipe it, or insert it. You can pay in store, you can withdraw cash from an ATM, and you can shop online. The metal card does not make transactions faster, it does not unlock new payment methods, and it doesn’t solve any of the friction points that still plague consumers when they move money across borders. Its sole innovation lies in the way it makes you feel about paying.
This is not a criticism of Revolut as the company is far from alone in this approach. The metal card is borrowing from a long history of payment card marketing that has used aspiration as its secret weapon. Think about the American Express and its Centurion “black card”, and the gold and platinum cards that banks pushed through the 1990s and early 2000s.
The principle has always been the same: the card is mundane in function but aspirational in status. It becomes a way of saying something about yourself to others – and to yourself!
The genius of the metal card is not in engineering and it’s not in innovation; the metal card is an element of aspirational branding. Metal cards tap into the psychological power that comes from literally holding something weighty and exclusive. In an age where digital wallets and virtual cards are becoming mainstream, Revolut has managed to make a physical piece of metal feel like the future.
Faster Horses, Not New Vehicles
This kind of “innovation” is a textbook example of what might be called the “faster horse” problem. The phrase is usually attributed to Henry Ford, who is often (maybe) quoted as saying: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” But even if it wasn’t something that Mr Ford ever said it, the idea captures an important truth: most people can only imagine progress as an incremental improvement on what already exists.
Most people will struggle to picture a leap into something fundamentally different, and this is as true for senior executives as it is for the people they are selling to – but the senior executives are more likely to deny it!
The metal card is the faster horse, the senior executive understands the horse race, the investor has confidence in the ability of the senior executive to train the horse to win the race, and so the investor bets on the horse.
The metal card is not a new mode of transportation, and it does not reimagine the payment ecosystem. The metal card simply takes the existing horse – the ubiquitous plastic debit card – and makes it “faster”, stronger, and better looking.
For Revolut, and the rest, the metal card works brilliantly as a marketing strategy. It gives customers something tangible, something they can show off, and something that delivers satisfaction straight out of the high-end packaging.
But from the perspective of innovation, it is innovation as applied to marketing rather than innovation as applied to technology. A metal card represents a surface polish rather than structural change – a metal card is still a card.
What Real Innovation Looks Like in Payments
It’s worth pausing here to consider what genuine innovation has looked like in the payments industry.
The move from cash to cards was a profound shift as it changed how people carried money, how merchants accepted it, how the movement of money was managed by the card schemes and the banks.
The ability to move value from one account to another instantaneously, was equally profound, as moving money across networks became the logical equivalent of handing someone a tenner.
PayPoint was an innovation, not because of the underlying technologies, but because the transfer of value was in the opposite direction to the norm – merchants collected funds rather than receiving funds, allowing consumers to pay bills at local stores.
The ability to share financial data quickly and easily through Open Banking is, I believe, innovative as it takes an authentication technology and uses it to allow the secure sharing of data. Open Banking payments, however, are not innovative as A2A transfers and retail payments are already “fast” enough.
So, on the infrastructure side, the growth of real-time clearing houses and alternative instant payment systems has been transformative, enabling money to move between accounts in seconds rather than days. The rise of open banking has begun to unlock entirely new models of financial services, where data portability gives consumers more power and choice. These are not faster horses, they are the invention of the automobile, the train, the airplane. They fundamentally reshape the rails on which payments move.
The metal card, by comparison, looks more like an accessory than a breakthrough.
Innovation as Marketing Gloss
The problem is that genuine innovation is hard. It is expensive, time-consuming, and often invisible to consumers – and senior executives – in the short term. Building an instant payments infrastructure requires years of investment and coordination between multiple institutions. Developing a mobile wallet involves complex security, partnerships with handset makers, and regulatory approval. These are the kinds of projects that can take a decade to yield fruit.
Marketers, on the other hand, need something to sell today. They need stories, images, and features that can capture the imagination quickly, and so “innovation” becomes shorthand for anything that looks and feels new, regardless of whether it actually is.
In Revolut’s case, my YouTube experience presented the metal card as a premium option, and as evidence of the company’s relentless drive to innovate, and yet the actual innovation was minimal. The card is heavier, yes, and it’s made of a different material, but it’s not going to alter the payment experience in any meaningful way.
Selling Aspiration
Why does this work so well?
Because aspiration is easy to sell, and humans are status-seeking creatures.
We are drawn to symbols that communicate belonging, success, and exclusivity. A metal card may function in exactly the same way as a plastic one, but it feels like an upgrade. The metal card is a subtle badge of achievement, making the act of paying less about the payment and more about the person making the payment.
Revolut is good at marketing and has been able to use those skills to develop and package the aspiration associated with the metal card for everyone. So, unlike the Amex Centurion, reserved for a tiny elite of Amex cardholders, Revolut’s metal cards are available to anyone willing to pay the subscription fee.
Customers are effectively paying for the privilege of belonging to a premium tier, with the heavy card as their daily reminder of belonging to the elite metal card club.
Revolut is innovating in psychology rather than technology and is doing this by tapping into a desire for status. Revolut has developed aspiration as a service, and it’s a service that is charged for every month.
The Investor’s Dilemma
From the perspective of the investor, and without a doubt, the metal card is a smart marketing move. It can generate predictable subscription revenue, create brand loyalty, is easy to market and it’s quick to scale. In other words, it delivers exactly the kind of near-term returns that investors like to see.
By contrast, the harder, slower innovations, like building new payment rails, investing in security protocols, or lobbying for regulatory change, are much less attractive in the short term. They may eventually pay off massively, but they require patience, and investors are not famous for their patience.
The industry, and the payment industry is not alone, is flooded with “innovations” that are essentially cosmetic, tweaks or cosmetic tweaks, because those are the ones that are easy to sell and easy to monetise.
The Dilution of Innovation
The consequence of this cycle of innovation and investment is that the word “innovation” has become seriously diluted. If a metal card counts as innovation, then so does adding Bluetooth to a toothbrush or changing “Marathon” to “Snickers” – if it’s change that you’re after, everything counts! A new colour, a different texture, a slightly altered app interface, they all get the same label – and when everything is innovation, nothing is innovation.
This dilution has real consequences. Consumers become cynical, assuming that innovation is just a buzzword. Regulators may struggle to separate the signal from the noise, and the industry risks overlooking the harder, slower, but more meaningful changes that could genuinely improve how people interact with money.
Why It Matters
At one level, it doesn’t really matter that Revolut calls its metal card innovative. Customers seem to like it, investors like it, and the company generates revenue. Everyone wins. But at another level, it matters a great deal, because it reflects a wider cultural drift in how we think about progress.
If we equate innovation with aspiration, then we risk mistaking tweaking and polishing for progress. We risk celebrating cosmetic upgrades at the same time as we ignore deeper, structural problems. We might funnel resources into marketing gloss whilst under-investing in infrastructure, and we might applaud the faster horse whilst failing to imagine the car.
This is not just about payments. It is about the way technology as a whole is sold to us. The smartphone industry churns out annual “innovations” that are little more than incremental tweaks. The automotive industry brands bigger screens and shinier trims as breakthroughs, whilst the real innovations in energy transition and autonomy remain elusive. Across industries, we are seeing the same pattern: innovation as marketing, rather than innovation as transformation.
Conclusion: Be Careful What We Applaud
Revolut’s metal card is a case study in the marketing of innovation; it works, and their YouTube advert certainly hit the spot for me! The metal card marketing demonstrates how a product can be positioned as groundbreaking when, in reality, it changes nothing but our aspirations. However, it does show how effective a strategy can be, because aspiration sells.
If we want to preserve the meaning of innovation, and if we want to encourage the kinds of breakthroughs that actually change the way we live and work, we need to be a whole lot more critical. We need to be asking whether the faster horse is really the progress we are led to believe it to be, or whether we should be holding out for something that takes us further.
Innovation should mean more than tweaking and polishing. It should mean re-imagining the possible by combining technologies to address the real problems facing real peoples.
Until then, we will keep mistaking heavier cards for heavier thinking.
