Revolut‘s Rita chatbot error landed some Ultra subscribers with an unexpected break fee when they tried to cancel their £55-a-month plan after the digital bank quietly cut a key membership perk. Revolut has since apologised and confirmed it is waiving early termination charges for customers cancelling on those grounds, but not before the automated assistant had already demanded payment from at least some users.
The chatbot at the centre of the episode is Rita, which stands for ‘Revolut’s Intelligence Troubleshooting Assistant’ and handles queries through the bank’s in-app support. According to FinTech Futures, Rita is accessible via the mobile app’s messenger support service and during its pilot scheme resolved around 20% of customer queries. That resolution rate underlines how much weight the bank places on the tool, which made the misfiring over cancellation requests all the more damaging.
The trouble began after Revolut reduced the number of WeWork office locations available to Metal and Ultra plan holders. Revolut confirmed the cut earlier this week. The bank’s Ultra tier costs £55 per month, and discounted access to WeWork sites had been a selling point of the plan. When customers moved to cancel or downgrade after discovering the reduction, Rita told them they owed a break fee for leaving within six months of signing up.
In an exchange seen by City AM, the chatbot told one customer: ‘I understand your frustration regarding the changes to the Wework and Perplexity benefits, and that this break fee is unexpected given the situation.’ The fee it quoted was £55, the equivalent of one month’s subscription, to move to Revolut’s free alternative.
WeWork cuts and the fallout for Revolut subscribers
WeWork pointed to ‘economic factors’ for reducing the number of locations available to Revolut customers. The reduction left around 265 sites accessible to subscribers, but more than half of those are in the United States, where Revolut’s customer base is considerably smaller. Paris, Milan and Edinburgh all had their locations removed entirely, leaving UK and European customers with sharply fewer options than they had signed up for.
A person close to the bank told City AM that membership partnerships are governed by different terms from Revolut’s general conditions, permitting both Revolut and a partner to alter or cancel perks at any time. Participating locations are also controlled by WeWork itself, that person added. Revolut’s standard terms and conditions do, however, promise 30 days’ notice before any change to an existing product or service, a commitment that some customers felt had not been honoured given the lack of advance warning over the WeWork reduction.
Separately, Revolut informed customers at the start of August that it would be swapping its AI answer engine Perplexity for ChatGPT in September, another change to the Ultra package’s benefits that had not passed without notice among subscribers.
Revolut Rita chatbot error prompts apology
A Revolut spokesperson addressed the Revolut Rita chatbot error directly: ‘We are not charging an early termination fee for customers who reach out to customer support wishing to downgrade their plan, as a result of this recent update.’ The spokesperson added: ‘We apologise that this option was temporarily unavailable to some users.’
The episode arrives at a moment when subscriptions have become a central pillar of the bank’s finances. Revolut reported 67% growth in subscription revenue to £708m in the most recent year, making it one of the bank’s top revenue drivers. Protecting subscriber confidence in the value and stability of those paid plans therefore carries considerable commercial weight, and the combination of a reduced WeWork benefit and a chatbot wrongly demanding fees for cancellation is not a helpful sequence of events for the bank to explain away.
Revolut said it still has a ‘good working relationship with Wework and they remain a valued partner’, suggesting the companies do not expect the partnership to end, even if its terms have narrowed.
