Revolut’s moment of reckoning: growing up isn't easy
For a company built on speed, Revolut suddenly finds itself in a long and uncomfortable wait.
Once the poster child of Europe’s fintech revolution — a smartphone app promising to make banking borderless, instant and low-cost — Revolut now faces a slower, sterner kind of scrutiny. Britain’s banking regulators are hesitating to grant the company a full UK banking licence, citing concerns about its global risk controls.
It’s a technical phrase with heavy meaning. To Revolut, it’s a bureaucratic delay. To the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), it’s a question of trust: can this fast-growing fintech behave like a real bank?
The long road to respectability
Revolut has had a restricted banking licence in the UK since mid-2024. In theory, this was the final step before full authorisation — a “mobilisation” phase in which the company was meant to prove it could meet the full range of capital, compliance and operational standards required of a bank.
In practice, it has become an extended probation. Fourteen months later, the regulators still aren’t satisfied. According to reports from Reuters and the Financial Times, supervisors are uneasy about whether Revolut’s risk systems — particularly across its sprawling international operations — meet the standard they expect from a domestic bank.
For Revolut, which serves more than 60 million customers worldwide, that hesitation is more than an administrative nuisance. A full licence would allow it to take larger deposits, expand lending, and bring more financial products under its own roof. Instead, it remains in a grey zone: a global fintech giant that still depends on third-party banking partners in its home market.
When growth meets governance
At the heart of the issue lies a familiar tension — between the restless speed of a startup and the measured caution of a bank.
Revolut’s co-founder and CEO, Nik Storonsky, has built his career on defying slow systems. A former derivatives trader, he founded Revolut in 2015 to make global finance as frictionless as sending a text. The company raced from a travel card to a full digital financial platform, adding crypto trading, stock investing and even insurance. Its user growth was breathtaking; its internal systems often less so.
Storonsky has since admitted that Revolut’s early expansion sometimes prioritised growth over governance. “We tried to shortcut,” he said earlier this year. It’s the kind of self-critique that suggests both candour and calculation — an acknowledgement that, to become a bank, Revolut must look less like a rebel and more like an institution.
But culture is hard to change overnight. Revolut’s startup ethos — rapid iteration, global ambition, minimal bureaucracy — is both its strength and its vulnerability. Building proper banking infrastructure means more staff, slower decisions, more rules. In fintech circles, that’s almost heresy.
A company — and a founder — under the microscope
The delays have raised uncomfortable questions about leadership, transparency, and Revolut’s long-term direction.
Storonsky recently changed his official residence from the UK to the United Arab Emirates, a move that drew notice from regulators and investors alike. On paper, it’s a personal decision for a globe-trotting CEO. Symbolically, it’s trickier: the head of Britain’s most successful fintech now lives outside the UK at a time when he’s asking British regulators for their trust.
Behind the scenes, Revolut has been trying to show it can grow up. It switched auditors from BDO to EY, added compliance veterans to its senior ranks, and invested heavily in internal controls. But old perceptions die hard.
Last year, Lithuania’s central bank — where Revolut holds its EU banking licence — fined the company €3.5 million for weaknesses in anti-money-laundering checks. There was no evidence of actual laundering, but the finding reinforced a broader impression: that Revolut’s systems had not always kept up with its scale.
Regulators don’t forget that kind of thing. For them, the question isn’t just whether Revolut has fixed past issues, but whether it has built a culture capable of preventing new ones.
A global empire with local problems
The irony is that Revolut has achieved what most fintechs only dream of: genuine global reach. It holds licences in Lithuania and Mexico, operates across Europe, Asia and the Americas, and is pursuing approval in the United States and Colombia.
That reach, however, is precisely what complicates its UK ambitions. Regulators now expect banks to demonstrate coherent oversight across their entire footprint — not just in one office or country. For Revolut, whose data, compliance and risk systems are distributed across multiple jurisdictions, that’s a formidable challenge.
The PRA’s caution is therefore as much about precedent as about one firm. If the UK grants Revolut a full licence, it will be setting the benchmark for what a global fintech must prove. And if it refuses, it sends a message to the wider industry: regulation has caught up with the disruptors.
Revolut’s growing pains mirror a maturing industry
In truth, Revolut’s predicament says as much about the evolution of fintech as it does about one company.
A decade ago, fintechs could get away with promising disruption first and compliance later. Investors rewarded growth curves, not governance structures. But the landscape has changed. The collapse of several crypto platforms, the retreat of easy capital, and rising interest rates have shifted priorities. Today, regulators and markets alike want evidence of resilience, not just vision.
For Revolut, that means proving it can be both agile and accountable — not an easy combination. It also means acknowledging that the era of “move fast and break things” is over, at least in financial services.
The company insists it remains confident and continues to work constructively with regulators.
The licence that means more than a licence
So what happens next?
If Revolut satisfies the PRA’s requirements, it could gain its full licence within months. That would allow it to lend more directly, hold more deposits, and eventually pursue its long-rumoured initial public offering. It would also represent a symbolic victory — proof that a fintech born in the post-crisis, anti-banking mood of the 2010s could evolve into a regulated institution.
If not, the consequences could be more complex. Revolut might deepen its focus on non-UK markets, expanding further in India and the Middle East, or leaning on its Lithuanian licence to continue operating across Europe. But failing to secure full approval in its home market would cast a shadow over its credibility with investors — and perhaps over the wider fintech sector’s dream of levelling the playing field with the old banks.
There is also the matter of timing. Revolut’s valuation, once whispered at over $30 billion, has softened amid the broader fintech correction. A successful UK licence could restore confidence; further delays might do the opposite.
A test that reaches beyond one company
In the end, the Revolut saga is not just about one firm’s paperwork. It’s a test case for whether Europe’s fintech champions can cross the line from disruption to institution.
If Revolut wins approval, it will mark a turning point: proof that a digital-first company can master the slow art of banking without losing its edge. If it falters, the message will be equally clear — that in finance, ambition without governance is still a risk regulators are unwilling to take.
Either way, something larger is shifting. The fintechs that once vowed to “kill the banks” are now trying to become them. And in the process, they’re discovering that maturity may be the hardest innovation of all.