European $100 billion fintech giant shifts to Zhipu GLM: AI coding bills cut by about 90%

Beating AI News Flash: Revolut, Europe's most valuable fintech unicorn, has made Zhipu GLM the default AI coding model for approximately 2,000 engineers. Tools like Claude Code and Codex have been relegated to backup options, mainly reserved for complex tasks.

David Abitbol, Head of AI Operations at Revolut, revealed that the company previously set a $300 per person per month quota for Claude Code, but it provided limited help for overall efficiency. In April of this year, the company began self-deploying GLM, offering engineers unlimited tokens.

Currently, Revolut uses approximately 56 NVIDIA B200 GPUs to run GLM 5.3, with a blended cost of about $0.30 per million tokens — only one-tenth of what it previously spent on Anthropic and OpenAI. According to internal company statistics, engineers' coding time metrics improved by about 60%, and the cycle time from task assignment to delivery improved by about 70%.

In the past, with limited tokens, engineers tended to save them for complex tasks. Now they don't need to ration, and they've started using AI extensively to search internal documents, process Jira tickets, and find requirement specs in Slack.

Only when tokens are cheap enough that you don't have to budget carefully can AI move from a handful of complex tasks to the entire R&D workflow.