Revolut

Overview

Revolut is the London-based digital finance company that spent five years fighting for permission to become a real bank in its home market — and won. On March 11, 2026, the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) allowed Revolut to exit the “mobilisation” phase of its restricted banking licence, clearing it to operate as a fully licensed UK bank with protected deposit accounts and, eventually, lending products (Reuters). The company had first applied in 2021 and received a licence with restrictions in July 2024, which left its mobilisation period running about 20 months — well beyond the usual 12-month limit (Reuters). Founded in 2015 by former derivatives trader Nikolay Storonsky and software developer Vladyslav Yatsenko, Revolut now counts 13 million customers in Britain and more than 65 million worldwide, with a $75 billion private-market valuation that makes it Europe’s most valuable startup (Reuters).

This profile covers the London financial-technology company founded in 2015 — not to be confused with any similarly named entity.

The five-year licence battle

Revolut applied for a UK banking licence in 2021, but the road was slow: the PRA only granted a licence with restrictions in July 2024, after a three-year wait (Reuters). The restricted licence put Revolut into mobilisation, a testing phase in which a new bank must prove its IT, compliance and risk-management systems before it can operate without limits (Reuters). Most banks complete mobilisation within about a year; Revolut’s dragged on for roughly 20 months, the longest on record for a UK bank (Reuters).

The delay was not routine. The Financial Times reported in October 2025 that Bank of England officials had sought commitments from Revolut to build risk-management infrastructure matching its international expansion, with the PRA scrutinising the robustness of its controls both in Britain and abroad (Reuters). Revolut pointed to its scale, calling the process “the largest and most complex mobilisation ever undertaken in the UK” (Reuters).

With restrictions lifted, Revolut can offer FSCS-protected deposit accounts and move into lending and other products, competing head-to-head with high-street lenders including Barclays, Lloyds and NatWest (Reuters). Co-founder and CEO Nik Storonsky, who has said getting the home-market licence was his top priority, called it “a vital step in our mission to build the world’s first truly global bank” (Reuters). The company said it would start rolling out current accounts within days, with full customer migration expected to take a few months (Reuters).

The UK licence is the capstone of a multi-jurisdiction strategy: Revolut already holds a banking licence in Lithuania, which it uses as a “passport” into the European Union, is seeking a licence in France, and has applied for a US bank charter (Reuters).

From the Lehman trading desk to fintech

Storonsky’s path to Revolut runs through the 2008 crisis. Born in Moscow in 1984, he studied general and applied physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and applied economics and finance at Moscow’s New Economic School before moving to the UK in 2004 (World Finance). He joined Lehman Brothers as a derivatives trader in 2006 — and when the bank collapsed, he personally lost around half a million pounds (World Finance). The shock, he told the Financial Times, taught him “the value of backing every decision with data and logic” (World Finance).

After moving to Credit Suisse, where he worked as an equity derivatives trader from 2008 to 2013, Storonsky began hatching an idea for an easy-to-use app that would cut fees on spending in different currencies (World Finance). In 2015 he co-founded Revolut with Vladyslav Yatsenko, a British-Ukrainian software developer who had cut his teeth at UBS and Deutsche Bank and remains the company’s chief technology officer (World Finance; The Business Times). Revolut started as a prepaid card with free currency exchange, then expanded into cryptocurrency trading, commission-free stock trading and business accounts (The Business Times). Storonsky has said he wants to build the “Amazon of banking” (World Finance).

The business behind the valuation

Revolut’s growth strategy has been to attract customers who use it as a secondary account for payments and foreign exchange, then sell them perks like subscriptions — though analysts note average customer deposits remain lower than at traditional banks and too few customers use it as their primary account (Reuters). New revenue streams have done heavy lifting: cryptocurrency trading helped power Revolut to its first annual profit in 2021, and a crypto boom helped its profit in 2024, when profits more than doubled to £1 billion (World Finance; Reuters). By late 2020, its Revolut Business arm — aimed at helping businesses send and receive payments from overseas at lower cost — had signed up more than 500,000 clients since 2017 and launched online payments acceptance, putting it in the same space as payments giants Stripe and Adyen (The Business Times).

The company’s aggressive, high-pressure culture has drawn repeated scrutiny, with former employees describing unachievable targets and long hours; Storonsky has said the company is “a different company than we were two to three years ago” and that it has learned lessons (World Finance). As of September 2025, Revolut said it had surpassed 65 million customers worldwide (World Finance).

What this profile does not claim

• This profile does not claim Revolut operated as a full UK bank before March 11, 2026. Until then it ran on a licence with restrictions (mobilisation), and before 2024 on an electronic-money setup without full deposit protection.
• It does not state the specific deposit cap that applied during mobilisation; trade-press figures could not be verified from a primary source.
• The $75bn valuation reflects a private-market secondary share sale, not an audited valuation — critics have questioned whether the price tag is justified (World Finance).
• It does not assess whether Revolut’s risk controls are now adequate; the PRA’s decision speaks to regulatory sign-off, not to the underlying debate reported by the FT.
• The FCA register entry for Revolut Bank UK Ltd was not independently checked (see openItems).