HSBC’s new FX app Zing off to a “slow” start, as Wise and Revolut estimated to be downloaded five and 30 times more

It has been hyped as the big UK fintech launch of the year so far, as banking juggernaut HSBC looked to take on fintech disruptors.

Zing, HSBC’s free-to-download app, launched on January 3 this year in the UK, offering cheap foreign exchange to retail consumers, taking on the likes of Revolut and Wise.

The executive behind Zing, James Allan, said it represented a “new kind of international payments solution”.

But UK download estimates from app analytics firm Apptopia suggest the app has got off to a “slow start”.

Between January 3 and February 27, the Zing app is estimated to have had 36,000 UK downloads, compared to Wise's 203,000 UK downloads and Revolut's 1.087 million UK downloads, in the same period.

Globally, in the same period, Wise had 3.7 million downloads, and Revolut 7.2 million.

However, Wise, founded in 2011, with over 16 million customers and Revolut, founded in 2015, with more than 35 million customers, are, unlike Zing, established global brands.

Zing is only available in the UK for now but HSBC plans to roll it out in two more continents by the end of this year.

Thomas Grant, VP of research, Apptopia, said “it had been a slow start” for Zing.

But Grant added:

“As we have seen with other fintech apps, building trust over time is what matters most and can lead to longer-term growth no matter how fast or slow they start."

Downloads is only one measure of the performance of a new app; Tech.eu does not have figures relating to revenue per customer; frequency of use, or other metrics.

Apptopia uses an algorithm that combines publicly available metadata from the App Store and Google Play along with its proprietary device panel data to generate daily estimates of mobile app performance.  These daily estimates include downloads.

A spokesperson for Zing said: “Zing has enjoyed a successful launch in our first market, the UK, over the past 8 weeks and we look forward to sharing news about the availability of Zing in other markets in the future."