Revolut’s Billion-Pound Rise Meets State Scrutiny

Revolut posted a profit of £1.3 billion in 2025 and had more than 80 million customers, even as regulators restricted new product launches and delayed its full banking licence. Its rapid expansion has put a private financial giant and the state’s oversight machinery on the same stage: one sets the pace of business, while the other decides which services can proceed.

Growth, with regulators watching

In 2025, the European Central Bank temporarily barred Revolut from launching new products as it reviewed whether the company’s controls could keep pace with its growth. In the United Kingdom, regulators delayed its full banking licence while assessing whether its controls and financial-crime prevention measures suited a company of its size. Those decisions set limits on what Revolut can offer, even as founder and chief executive officer Nik Storonsky describes his push to build the first global bank at the speed of a technology company.

The company says it has devoted substantial technical labour to compliance. Storonsky said about 200 engineers worked on regulatory-compliance tools, while another team of about 250 engineers, data scientists and product staff tackled financial-crime regulation. He said Revolut uses artificial intelligence in engineering, customer support, compliance and financial-crime prevention, and expects it to affect every part of the business.

Revolut began in 2015. It expanded through payments, cards, foreign exchange, subscriptions and investing, rather than the large loan books common at traditional banks. Storonsky said its loan-to-deposit ratio stood around 4%, and he didn’t expect it to top 10%, 15% or 20%. He called the approach cautious and designed to avoid risky business.

A private company scales up

Revolut had around 10 million customers in 2019, the first year it published results, and recorded a loss of nearly £100 million. By 2025, it had posted a profit of £1.3 billion and counted more than 80 million customers. Eleven business lines each brought in more than £100 million in annual revenue; interest made up 21.6% of total income, while cards, subscriptions, investing and foreign exchange accounted for most of the business.

Revolut doesn’t publish standard bank profitability metrics. Calculations from its accounts put return on equity at about 35% in 2025, compared with 16.3% for Santander and 19.3% for BBVA. The figures aren’t fully comparable: listed banks publish official ratios, but Revolut does not. The company remains privately held, and Storonsky said a stock-market listing was unlikely before 2028. A secondary share sale that summer valued Revolut at about $115 billion.

Asked what winning would mean, Storonsky said: “I hope I can say we have won if we are larger than JPMorgan [laughs]. I'm not sure if it's possible in 15 years' time, but we'll see.” The ambition is plain. The company is already enormous. It wants to set the terms of its own growth.

The old systems and the new one

Storonsky said traditional banks often rely on legacy systems, sometimes outsourced, and were built to operate in one country. When they expanded, he said, many bought other banks and wound up with systems that couldn’t communicate. He argued that Revolut’s centralized systems can adapt to local markets and scale across countries. At legacy banks, he said, “it's almost impossible to get something new off the ground,” pointing to limited systems and internal processes built to slow initiatives amid heavy regulation.

He also called Europe’s fragmentation a barrier to creating more companies like Revolut, contrasting Europe’s many countries and regulators with the United States and Silicon Valley’s cycle of entrepreneurs reinvesting in startups. He said Europe is more heavily regulated than the United States, which is a single market. Lending, he said, faces heavier regulation than lifestyle products and has become largely commoditized. He cited Klarna’s buy-now-pay-later product as perhaps the latest lending innovation, while noting that it, too, became heavily regulated.

Storonsky described his management style as minimizing hierarchy: he sets goals, gives teams autonomy and measures results. Product teams test ideas with small groups, then shift resources to those that show promise. At Revolut, autonomy still sits inside a company where the chief executive sets goals and regulators decide whether expansion can proceed. The new Paris headquarters at 116 Rue Réaumur was still under construction when he spoke; its offices were expected to take months to complete.