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........

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