Revolut employees will don their black ties on Thursday night and head to the City of London’s Mansion House to toast the $75 billion (€63.8 billion) fintech securing a full banking licence after a four-year wrangle with British watchdogs.
The company’s chief executive, Nik Storonsky, also put on his formal wear earlier this month and headed to Washington. Storonsky met with regulators, politicians – and even briefly with European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde – as part of a charm offensive to secure a similar licence in the US, according to people familiar with the matter.
Storonsky is hoping a US banking licence, which Revolut applied for in March, could take as little as four months to attain.
But licensing is not the only thing on the 41-year-old’s mind. During his American foray, Storonsky also confirmed that Revolut would push for an initial public offering, even if it was at least two years away.
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“We’re a bank, and for a bank it’s super important to have trust. Public companies are trusted more compared to private companies,” he said.
The stakes could not be higher. Revolut was targeting a $200 billion valuation when an IPO eventually happens, the FT reported. The personal incentives for Storonsky are just as high: a valuation this large would unlock a reward package that would value his stake at $78 billion.
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A $200 billion valuation in two years’ time is not necessarily outlandish. Three people familiar with the matter said Revolut would start one of its secondary share sales later this year that would value the fintech at between $100 billion and $120 billion. The company said it was “premature” to confirm timings or valuation.
JPMorgan Chase analysts also wrote in a client note last week that Revolut’s more than 70 million customers across 40 countries numbered “more than the combined scale of Monzo, Starling, N26, Bunq, and Wise, and [are] approaching that of JPMorgan Chase”.
This scale has helped give Revolut a valuation of 13 times its revenues, compared to about four times for other fintechs.
With a potential IPO and more regulatory green lights to grow its banking services, Revolut’s highly profitable model – the company saw pretax profits surge last year by 57 per cent to £1.7 billion from £4.5 billion of revenues – will come under fresh scrutiny.
“It does a lot of things well but banking isn’t one of them,” said John Cronin, a banking analyst. “It’s not anywhere yet from a banking perspective.”
Becoming more like a bank, with the ability to increase customer deposits and recycle them into loans, was critical to sustaining Revolut’s growth, which underpins its ambitious valuation, he argued.
In Ireland, for instance, three-quarters of adults hold a Revolut account. But plans to roll out mortgages have been delayed.
“They have been hugely successful at customer penetration – Revolut has become a verb here,” said Denis McGoldrick, head of financials research at Goodbody Stockbrokers. “But lending is a different game.”
Investors are more sanguine.
“This has the chance to be a European Amazon in terms of being a hyperscaler,” said one large early backer of Revolut. “They will do to lending what they did to payments.”
While big UK banks generate most of their money through deposits and lending, Revolut instead made 76 per cent of its revenues last year through fees on services such as cryptocurrency trading, foreign-exchange trading or subscriptions to its premium services that give users perks.
Interest income that it accrued through its own deposits made up just 21.6 per cent of revenue, compared to about 70 per cent for rival Monzo. The JPMorgan note also flagged that “the revenue base is increasingly diversified, with no single product or country contributing >30 per cent”.
Such fee income is highly coveted by traditional banks because it is less volatile than interest-rate-dependent income. Lloyds Banking Group, for example, has focused on non-interest income as a cornerstone of its strategy.
However, while Revolut has generated significant profits from its various payments businesses, it has failed to muscle in on lucrative lending markets, even where it has been fully licensed to do so.
Last year Revolut’s total credit portfolio was £2.2 billion. That was an increase of 120 per cent compared to 2024 but from a low base. For comparison, a small specialist lender such as OneSavings Bank had about £25.9 billion in net loans last year. UBS analysts said Revolut’s loan book was “very modest” relative to the group’s balance sheet.
One person close to Revolut acknowledged that its credit strategy was still in the early stages and less mature than traditional banks. The intent was to build a large customer base and a profitable business model based on fees before lending sustainably, the person added.
JPMorgan analysts said that “building the requisite underwriting expertise, credit infrastructure and regulatory capital to scale lending, absent a strategic acquisition, will likely be a multiyear endeavour”.
Part of that is down to customers not using Revolut as a “primary” account for wages, which has hit its deposit gathering.
JPMorgan found Revolut made about £66 per consumer annually compared to £101 for Monzo, £204 for Starling and £300-£400 for traditional UK retail banks.
Revolut insiders bristle at comparisons between its early-stage credit strategy and 100-year-old institutions, particularly when it still lacks a licence to lend in many markets.
Even in the EU, where Revolut has held a Lithuanian banking licence since 2018, it has been slow to grow lending.
“In Spain deposits still only amount to ~€4 billion (a 0.25 per cent share) over 2 years after launch. Personal loan growth has been slower still and Revolut only offers mortgages in Lithuania,” wrote Citi, which judged Revolut would have “limited” impact on banking incumbents.
Revolut contends that its credit offerings are growing and that it holds 20 per cent of the unsecured personal loan market in Lithuania.
The fintech is also hoping its full UK banking licence will change things. One senior executive said it was planning to launch consumer credit products, overdrafts and credit cards in the UK, in the hope that more banking services will lure more deposits to its accounts.
They added that the company would also explore business lending, as Revolut already had 767,000 business customers globally that it could leverage.
Meanwhile, others remain sceptical about whether Revolut wants to be a large lender at all.
The fintech’s US banking licence application sent to regulators suggests that its ambitions are mainly to provide the same digital assets and payments services that earned its spurs in the UK, rather than prioritising lending.
Revolut’s application states that core services would include “the ability to buy, sell, hold digital assets including stablecoins, remittances, digital asset staking”, and “Pay by Card with Digital Assets” as well as other payment and trading services.
The application also lists traditional credit products as core offerings, but Matthew Bisanz, a regulatory partner at the US law firm Mayer Brown, said the application suggested it would prioritise crypto and payments, at least for now. “They’re not trying to be a traditional bank,” said Bisanz, who is not advising Revolut on the matter.
Revolut’s business model could differ from country to country, according to one investor. They also added that the company was pursuing licences to unlock lending, but that it was by no means a key to its future growth prospects.
Another insider agreed, and said the main utility from the UK banking licence came more from the reputational effect, including that it can offer customers deposit accounts that are protected by the country’s Financial Services Compensation Scheme.
“It is about trust,” the person said, echoing Storonsky. “The licence gives users more faith to put their money with us, and that is also the point of the listing too.”
Not everyone is convinced. One senior executive at the company brushed off the idea of an IPO any time soon. “Our ability to do an enormous amount of liquidity in secondary [markets] at our own beck and call has been amazing,” they said. “Going public would be a distraction from the primary goal of this company, which is to grow.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
