The two-day Revolutionaries event in central London last November wasn’t just a celebration of Revolut’s 50 million customers’ milestone. It was another way to thank them, with special acts including a performance by singer Charli XCX and a startup surgery hosted by Revolut’s founder Nik Storonsky and Steven Bartlett, another British entrepreneur.
The approach illustrates how Revolut has built a mini culture around its brand. Plugs on social media by influencers who use the app are combined with music and fashion partnerships and, above all, the metallic, design-led, look and feel of the product itself.
At Primavera Sound Barcelona, one of the biggest music festivals in Europe, the main stage this year was the Revolut Stage. Customers could buy tickets in its app, access an exclusive Revolut zone, and buy food and drink at merchants using Revolut Pay. A Revolut ATM in the festival offered cash and card withdrawals, allowing you to become a customer on the spot. The bank has similar partnerships with the Sziget Festival in Budapest and Rock en Seine near Paris.
Slick and quick
The overall aim is to redefine banking, a goal which is evident in the background of its executives. Antoine Le Nel became Revolut’s chief growth and marketing officer in 2021 after occupying a similar role at King.com, a video game developer behind best known for Candy Crush Saga – hardly a common route into banking.
“We’re not doing marketing the way other banks are doing are doing it,” Le Nel tells Euromoney. “We have our own identity.”
Le Nel sums up Revolut’s user experience and brand as “slick and quick”. That includes the speed and ease of buying financial products in the app, as well as its in-app Shops and Stays features. Last June, Revolut launched RevPoints, a pan-European debit card loyalty programme allowing customers to accrue points on travel, accommodation and more, redeemable in part on the lifestyle section of its app. It also launched an in-app e-SIM service in the UK, further tying into its appeal to international travellers. RevPoints had 6.6 million users in its first six months.
“We see ourselves as a lifestyle platform that ultimately does banking,” says Le Nel.
Today, Revolut is one of Europe’s biggest finance apps, and already the biggest in many European countries. In Ireland, it counts more than three million customers, more than half of the population. Its absolute customer numbers are bigger still in France, Spain, Poland, Romania and the UK.
And it is just getting started. In the longer term, it is targeting 100 million daily active users across 100 countries. The bank onboarded a record 14.5 million new customers last year, its increase in customer numbers is highest among under 18s.
The best reflection of a consumer’s confidence is their ability to recommend a financial services product to a friend or a family member
Joe Heneghan
A secondary share sale to provide staff liquidity last August came at a $45 billion valuation, probably making it Europe’s most valuable private company. In a fourth consecutive year of profitability, 2024 revenues grew by 72% to £3.1 billion. Net income grew by 149% to £1.1 billion. Card payment revenues grew by 44% to £694 million. Transaction volumes rose by 52% to £1 trillion. FX revenue increased 58% to £422 million. Subscriptions revenue increased 74% to £244 million.
Revolut invested £467 million in sales, advertising and marketing in 2024. But it found that more than 65% of its customers joined via word of mouth or referrals.
“I think the best reflection of a consumer’s confidence is their ability to recommend a financial services product to a friend or a family member,” says Joe Heneghan, chief executive of Revolut’s Lithuania-licensed European Economic Area (EEA) bank. “That only happens when the service is brilliant.”
Heneghan points to Ireland, where he is based and has worked for local banks. He describes how Revolut’s instant payments product came well ahead of anything similar from Irish incumbent banks, leading to its name becoming a verb for money transfers in Ireland, much like Google for internet searches.
A mature, more local bank
Now coming up to its 10th birthday, 2024 was a year when Revolut matured as a regulated institution, involving a big expansion of its compliance and risk function. In July last year it received a banking licence in the UK, its biggest country, as part of the Prudential Regulatory Authority’s mobilisation stage for new banks completing their build-out of banking operations. That followed a move to direct supervision by the European Central Bank from the beginning of 2024.
Revolut saw a 59% increase last year in customers using it as their primary account, in other words for their salary. Customer balances, including those held with partner institutions, grew by 66% to £30.2 billion. As the customer lending portfolio grew by 86% to £979 million, it prepared to launch mortgages in countries where it offers unsecured loans, including Ireland, Lithuania and France.
“There’s nothing that can be more core to people’s centre of interest than managing their money,” says Le Nel.
This is not to say that the firm is restricting itself to basic retail banking deposits, however. Its business segment accounts for around 15% of group turnover and the number of business customers rose by 56% in 2024. In September it launched Revolut Billpay, a product designed to streamline supplier payments with accounting operations and optical character recognition. In August it launched its business proposition in Singapore, bringing the number of countries where it offers Revolut business to 40.
Meanwhile, Revolut continued to roll out instant-access savings accounts and money market funds in more countries.
There’s nothing that can be more core to people’s centre of interest than managing their money
Antoine Le Nel
Alongside the introduction of exchange-traded funds and European stocks, it started to pilot a separate Revolut Invest app in Czech Republic, Denmark and Greece in September. Revolut Trading became authorised as an investment firm in the UK in November. It launched Revolut X, a standalone crypto trading platform designed for experienced investors in May.
Rapid growth in the number of customers, balance sheet and in the sophistication of its product suite has encouraged Revolut to move to a more local and regional structure over past two years. It has, for example, prepared to launch Livret A deposit funds in France – its second biggest country, where it is setting up a new western Europe headquarters, with plans for a €1 billion investment in France. This new dual-headquarters model for the EEA further includes a scheme to gain a licence from the Banque de France.
By early 2025, Revolut’s EEA bank had set up branches in Germany, Ireland, Italy, Romania, Spain and the Netherlands, as well as France. It expanded the number of countries where it offers local IBANs during 2024 and integrated local peer-to-peer payments schemes such as Spain’s Bizum and Poland’s Blik.
“We want the app to be localised to the customer wherever they live,” says Heneghan.
Beyond Europe, Revolut gained a banking licence in Mexico, launched as a direct credit society in Brazil and recently gained permission to issue prepaid cards in India, all in 2024. Yet Revolut’s global operation remains extraordinarily lean by big bank standards.
Scalable technology development comes relatively natural to the firm, given its relative freedom from legacy tech. Its approach to launching products and capabilities in different markets similarly consists of creating a common playbook that it will then adapt to the individual market, says George Grumbar, head of Revolut’s French branch.
Grumbar gives the example of current accounts in France, despite different norms around monthly fees compared with the UK. “The fundamental needs of the banking customer are still going to be access to money, flexibility, security and confidence in the platform, and speed of using and transferring their money to others,” he says.
Revolut started work last year to secure additional licences around the world, from Colombia to New Zealand.
“We’ve got a large team of people who focus on discussions with regulators, making sure that the information flow is strong, and everything is well documented and noted. We will use previous experience with a regulator in one part of the world to inform us about how we can approach a regulator in another part of the world. You need some local expertise, but regulators are often looking for the same things. We can build blocks of how we approach the regulators on certain topics,” says Grumbar.
“If you iterate by paying attention to how each process goes, you can then improve the way that you approach it and be faster and better next time.” As Europe’s best digital bank, faster and better, could well be Revolut’s motto.
