Revolut’s mission to dominate banking
For years, it struggled to get a licence to operate as a bank. Now it wants to shake up the industry with an ‘everything app’
Laith Al-Khalaf
Revolut founder Nik Storonsky has built his UK-based fintech giant in his image © FT montage/Bloomberg/ShutterstockNik Storonsky was in a cheery mood as he visited the world’s biggest luxury yachtmaker on a drizzly day last October.
The Revolut founder had been catapulted into the ranks of Britain’s wealthiest people as he sealed a share sale valuing his fintech at $75bn. His stroll through the sprawling Lürssen-Kröger shipyard in northern Germany was a form of victory lap.
The 42-year-old inspected a 102-metre juggernaut which, when completed, would boast a 25-foot glass-bottomed infinity pool, a beach club and a gym with a cryotherapy chamber. Storonsky was enamoured, and eventually agreed to purchase it for €350mn.
His travel companion, the yacht broker Chris Cecil-Wright, is less pleased.
He alleges that the former Credit Suisse trader eventually cut him out of the deal by buying the yacht directly from its owner, despite him brokering the deal, according to legal documents seen by the FT.
His firm is now suing Storonsky for €17.5mn in allegedly unpaid commission, in a claim that Storonsky’s family office said was without merit.
Storonsky has built his UK-based fintech giant in his image: moving fast and seizing opportunities, while often ruffling feathers along the way.
Nik Storonsky founded Revolut after becoming incensed by the foreign-exchange fees charged by large banks © Al Drago/BloombergThe payments company has gone from a scrappy start-up to an institution that even Wall Street envies.
Its most recent share sale gave it a $115bn valuation — larger than every UK bank bar HSBC.
Now, it wants to expand its nascent credit business into a full-service bank and disrupt the industry much as Ryanair has transformed aviation.
If it succeeds, every financial services firm in Europe will have to take notice.
An offering that includes a private bank to compete with wealth managers, lifestyle perks to take customers from American Express and payment services that undercut high street banks could have a profound impact on European banking.
But first it needs to overcome several significant hurdles.
Despite being awarded a slew of banking licences, including by the Bank of England after a protracted delay, some consumers still do not trust Revolut enough to deposit large sums — possibly because of a history of sloppy internal controls and risk management.
Sid Jajodia, Revolut’s chief banking officer, says that the group has boosted safeguards to win over regulators.
“You’re never done.
You’re always enhancing and improving your capabilities,” he tells the FT.
“It’s about continuous improvement . . . trust is earned over time.”
Moreover, as Revolut enters more regulated credit markets and expands into new territories, it needs to retain the speedy and innovative approach that has allowed it to grow quickly so far.
Insiders think they can pull it off.
One senior person at the company adapts an analogy used by Apple founder Steve Jobs: “You can either operate like a navy or like pirates, and we’re probably more like pirates,” the person says.
“But I do think you can achieve both, with checks and balances that can also move quickly.”
And for the group’s diverse investor base, this is just the beginning.
Alex Immerman, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which invested in Revolut’s latest share sale, describes Revolut as “one of the most interesting companies globally.
When opportunities are truly global in nature like this, we pay attention.”
“I do think this can be a trillion-dollar company,” he adds.
Admirers in high places
When JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon first met Storonsky in 2019, on a US roadshow, America’s most powerful banker told him that he was impressed by Revolut’s progress but had misgivings about whether it could scale internationally outside Europe, according to people familiar with the interaction.
Today, it has more than 80mn customers across 40 countries — including the US — and Dimon admitted this year that he was “jealous” of the pushy upstart.
“We’ve learnt a lot by watching some of these folks,” he told an investment conference.
“And we’ve got to get faster and better sometimes.”
Revolut’s speed was built in from the beginning.
Russia-born Storonsky, a former champion swimmer with a lean frame and blond bob, founded the company in 2015 after being incensed by the foreign-exchange fees levied by traditional banks on customers travelling abroad.
It soon won over younger customers with its slick mobile phone applications and low exchange fees.
“What really made them stand out is they have such a beloved product, which spread through word of mouth,” says Immerman, of Andreessen Horowitz, contrasting Revolut with so-called neobanks in the US whose customers are still mostly recruited through advertising.
Alon Kuperman, a partner at Bullhound Capital, a small early Revolut investor, says that this “virality” among consumers was the “aha moment” that prompted his firm to invest in Revolut.
A Revolut ATM in Barcelona, Spain. The bank has more than 80mn customers across 40 countries © AlamyStoronsky also empowered an ethos of “self-guided missiles”, which allowed employees to innovate with limited oversight and to conjure up new products from e-sims to cryptocurrency trading.
Two current Revoluters say he personally tests them out on a mobile phone while sitting next to the developer.
This slew of products means Revolut looks less like the banks it hopes to usurp and more like the Chinese “everything apps”, such as Alipay and WeChat, which serve as payments platforms but bolt on a host of other services for their users.
Next year, it hopes to allow users to invest in private markets, according to one person familiar with its strategy, and plans to open a private bank in the UK.
Ygal El Harrar, a divisional head of tech for French banking group BNP Paribas, says that “if they get it right, there is a clear potential to become ‘the’ financial super app.
That is the story investors are buying into.”
It also makes for an eclectic business model.
The UK’s big four banks generate most of their revenue through the net interest margin — the difference between the rates paid to depositors and those levied upon borrowers.
Revolut’s headquarters in Canary Wharf, London. Despite being awarded a slew of banking licences, some consumers still do not trust Revolut enough to deposit large sums © Chris Ratcliffe/BloombergRevolut instead made three-quarters of its £4.5bn revenue last year through fees on services, including cryptocurrency trading, foreign-exchange trading, card payments and monthly subscriptions to premium services, which give users perks such as access to WeWork offices or airport lounges.
Less than £1bn came from net interest income.
None of these key business lines contributes much more than a fifth of overall revenues.
Four separate investors tell the FT this is a key strength, as it makes the company less exposed to movements in interest rates.
Growing up
As he welcomed guests, including the then chancellor Rachel Reeves, to the opening of Revolut’s new Canary Wharf headquarters last September, Storonsky admitted that he had made a foundational mistake.
“When we started international expansion many years ago, we tried to short-cut our banking licences and apply for lighter licences, e-money licences, FX licences, payment licences [ . . . ] and it was a worse product,” he said.
Nowhere was this more evident than on home turf. Revolut had applied to the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority for a UK banking licence in 2021, but the process was beset by challenges.
The group’s auditor, BDO, delayed signing off its accounts as it could not verify revenues, while the banking regulator was nervous that the company’s risk controls could not keep up with its international growth.
A banking licence had also never been handed out to a company as big as Revolut at the time.
The experience became hostile, with Storonsky deriding officials for being too slow and “principles-driven”.
“At times we probably did not help ourselves,” admits one senior person at the company.
“That was definitely a low point.”
But the experience inspired a clean-up at Revolut, which expanded its board, hired a UK chief executive, cleaved off a separate management team for its bank and hired more compliance and risk officers to satisfy the Bank of England.
The clean-up had more prosaic casualties.
When Revolut opened its first Canary Wharf offices, a forceful mantra was famously plastered across the walls in neon: “Get shit done”.
These days, Revolut has dropped the sign — and uses the more family-friendly ‘get it done’ for its office WiFi.
It paid off.
In March, Revolut was finally awarded a full UK banking licence.
Other regulators have followed suit, meaning Revolut can take customer deposits and use them to finance lending in those jurisdictions.
But some are sceptical about whether it can, or even wants to, become a lender.
“Building the requisite underwriting expertise, credit infrastructure and regulatory capital to scale lending, absent a strategic acquisition, will probably be a multiyear endeavour,” said analysts at JPMorgan in a report.
Last year Revolut’s total credit portfolio was £2.2bn, more than double the previous year but still tiny compared even with boutique lenders.
El Harrar, of BNP, added that growing the loan book would entail adding credit risk to its business model.
“They managed to leverage a position putting them in a golden spot, where they have been able to grow rapidly without having to bear any significant [credit] risk,” he says.
“As they expand into credit, the returns could be a point of attention.”
Jajodia, Revolut’s head of banking, accepts that lending brings credit risk, saying “we have been very prudent and patient with how we grow it”.
He adds that the group will hire specialists in underwriting and credit risk modelling as it builds its credit products.
“We’re testing the product, testing our models, and building on it in a very comfortable fashion.”
The company also has to tackle a perception problem.
“It is about trust,” says John Cronin, an independent banking analyst.
“People just don’t trust them enough to deposit large sums of money with them, and that is an issue . . . if they are hell-bent on raising deposits, they need to tackle that.”
An April analysis by Citibank found that Revolut’s average deposit was a fraction of that of the big four UK banks, and while it has attracted millions of customers, relatively few use it as their “primary” account into which their salaries are paid.
A consequence is that Revolut generates far less revenue per customer than its more conventional rivals.
Part of that is a legacy from Revolut’s swashbuckling early days.
But data drawn from the Financial Ombudsman Service by the consumer group Which? found that despite its relatively small size, Revolut had the greatest number of fraud complaints of any bank or fintech.
Between January and August 2025, Revolut customers referred 1,875 cases to the FOS.
It was top of the table the previous year too.
Revolut said it has launched a number of initiatives aimed at tackling fraud.
Jajodia believes a full banking licence, which protects up to £120,000 of customer deposits under the UK’s Financial Services Compensation Scheme, will change this.
“Where we’re already live as the bank, [we are thinking] about: how do we become a primary bank and how do we earn the trust?”
Diluting the sauce
As Revolut pushes into more regulated business lines, some worry that it will have to sacrifice some of the secret sauce that has allowed it to innovate and grow so rapidly.
Analysts at JPMorgan note that Revolut’s international expansion plans, which include spending £10bn to enter 30 new markets by 2030, “would meaningfully increase regulatory and operational complexity, cost, uncertainty and risk” with costs rising in parallel, not least because its operations will be scrutinised by more regulators.
“Any traditional lending institution of size has armies of risk management people, armies of internal controls people, credit teams,” says Cronin, the independent consultant.
“They will have some of that, but given they haven’t done it at scale, there’ll be a substantive staff investment as well.”
This tension came into focus last year after the European Central Bank slapped growth restrictions on Revolut’s European operations after finding “deficiencies” in its control and risk functions, which govern its breakneck release of new products.
But Kuperman, at Bullhound Capital, believes the benefits will outweigh the risks.
“The regulation . . . may mean that it will be a bit more difficult to move at the same speed, but compensating for that is having an extremely strong regulatory framework,” he tells the FT.
Approval in its home market will accelerate international expansion, as other watchdogs become more comfortable with the group’s operations, he adds.
Jajodia says Revolut will still move faster than other banks because it is underpinned by technology that it owns and controls, while they must contend with a patchwork of legacy systems and third-party providers that have never been properly integrated.
“That’s what brings us speed.
It’s not a lack of control or a lack of scrutiny,” he says.
For Brendan O’Boyle, head of financials at the venture capital firm Coatue, which led Revolut’s latest share sale, this “relentless execution” and digital model make the company “a credible candidate to become a meaningful player in pan-European banking”.
“It has many ways to win. User penetration is still less than 10 per cent across most of its European markets,” he adds, and the company has “barely scratched the surface” in terms of revenue per user.
Another European investment banker says Revolut could drive more structural change in the banking sector.
“If they succeed, it will catalyse more integration,” he says, adding that pan-European banks — many of which must contend with patchy software and siloed operations — envy Revolut’s integrated global approach.
While Revolut talks about itself as a bank, insiders say Storonsky ultimately has his eyes set on the tech giants of Silicon Valley.
“It’s a tech company,” says one executive.
“And I suppose the parallels would be the equivalents of the Amazons.”
Reconciling the dynamism of a founder-led business with broader corporate governance as the business grows will be a challenge, the executive predicts.
“Someone like Nik has got the intellect to do it, though.”
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