The past, present and future of Revolut

I see a story about Revolut every day, several times a day. As one of the most remarkable success stories in modern banking, it’s not surprising. In just a decade, it has grown from a prepaid travel card into a financial super app serving tens of millions of customers across dozens of countries and a valuation of over $100 billion that some predict will soon be $1 trillion.

It just got me thinking: why, how and what’s next? So, here goes …

Its rise has not been an accident. It reflects a combination of timing, technology, relentless execution and a willingness to challenge assumptions about what banking should look like.

The original proposition was simple: make foreign exchange cheap and transparent. That was the original aim of two guys sitting in an office in London back in 2014. Off we go.

At a time when traditional banks were charging hefty fees for international spending and transfers, Revolut offered something radically different. Customers could hold multiple currencies, exchange money at interbank rates and manage everything from their smartphone. Then, what began as a travel product quickly evolved into a broader financial platform.

Technology has been at the heart of its success.

Unlike incumbent banks burdened by decades of legacy infrastructure, Revolut was built as a digital-first organisation. Product development is rapid, features are added continuously and customer acquisition has largely been driven by word of mouth. The app combines banking, payments, cards, investments, savings, insurance and lifestyle services in one place. For many customers, it has become a financial operating system rather than simply a bank account.

Another factor behind its growth is its global mindset. Most banks and fintechs have a regional or domestic focus. Revolut was designed from the outset to operate internationally, appealing particularly to younger, mobile and digitally savvy consumers. The company has also been highly effective in creating premium subscription services that generate recurring revenues while providing customers with tangible benefits.

One of the most fascinating things about Revolut is that it doesn’t innovate like a bank. It innovates like a venture capital firm.

Inside Revolut is something called the “New Bets” system. The idea is simple. Instead of spending years debating new products through committees and bureaucracy, the company creates small entrepreneurial teams and gives them the freedom to behave like internal startups. Each team receives a million or more invested with limited resources, clear accountability and responsibility for both the product and its profitability.

Think of it as a portfolio of startups living inside Revolut.

There is a committee, often made up of former founders and entrepreneurial employees, that reviews opportunities and decides which ideas deserve investment. Once approved, teams move quickly. They launch, test, gather data and either scale or kill the product. Successes receive more resources whilst failures disappear. Nobody expects every idea to work. In fact, Nik Storonsky, the co-founder of Revolut, has openly said that some bets have been huge successes, some have failed completely and many sit somewhere in between.

This approach explains why Revolut continually surprises people. Premium subscriptions, crypto products, Revolut X, RevPoints, eSIMs and even branded ATMs have all emerged from the New Bets process. More than forty-five bets have been approved since the programme began.

The genius of the New Bets system is not that every idea succeeds. It is that Revolut has turned experimentation itself into a repeatable process.

Yet Revolut’s strengths are also its weaknesses.

The company moves fast, but speed sometimes creates friction. Customer service has often attracted criticism, particularly when accounts have been frozen due to anti-money laundering controls. Users have complained about difficulties reaching human support and resolving problems quickly. Traditional banks may be slower and more bureaucratic, but they often provide more reassurance when something goes wrong.

Equally, its sheer breadth of products can be confusing. Revolut offers everything from cryptocurrency and stock trading to travel insurance and eSIMs.

It’s all about their new vision of becoming a global financial superapp except that, while this creates a powerful ecosystem, it raises the question of whether every feature adds value or whether the app risks becoming cluttered. There is a delicate balance between becoming a super app and becoming a digital department store.

Regulation has been another challenge. As Revolut has grown, regulators have naturally applied greater scrutiny. Obtaining banking licences and managing compliance across multiple jurisdictions is expensive and complex. Scaling a fintech is relatively easy; scaling a regulated bank is much harder.

There are also questions about loyalty.

Many users view Revolut as a secondary account rather than their primary banking relationship. The challenge is to convert customers who use it for travel or payments into customers who trust it with their salaries, mortgages, pensions and long-term financial lives.

Despite these issues, Revolut has demonstrated something important. Consumers do not want more bank branches, paper forms or complex products. They want convenience, transparency, speed and control. Revolut understood this before many and that has been the core to their success today and their success is not because they reinvented finance. It is because they have removed friction from finance. That may sound simple, but simplicity is often the hardest thing to deliver.

Now, one of the most interesting questions about Revolut is how and whether it can become an AI-native bank.

There’s a huge difference.

A digital bank puts banking products inside an app. An AI-native bank puts intelligence at the centre of everything it does. The interface is no longer menus and screens. It is conversation, prediction and automation.

Revolut already has many of the ingredients. Unlike traditional banks burdened by fragmented legacy systems, it was born in the cloud. It has unified customer data, global payments infrastructure and millions of daily interactions. That data is fuel for artificial intelligence.

Today, AI is already being used behind the scenes. Fraud detection, anti-money laundering, customer support and personal finance insights all rely heavily upon machine learning. But those are first-generation applications. They make existing processes more efficient.

The next phase is more radical.

Instead of customers opening the app and asking questions, Revolut’s AI agent will understand goals and act on behalf of the customer. It will know when customers are travelling and automatically arrange currency exchanges. It will detect changes in their spending and recommend adjustments before problems emerge. It will move money between accounts, optimise investments and negotiate subscriptions without waiting for instructions.

This means the next generation Revolut will be the proactive platform for all things that involve money.

This requires more than adding ChatGPT to an app. Becoming AI-native means rebuilding the organisation around data and intelligence. Products become APIs whilst decisions become models. Customer journeys become conversations whilst employees work alongside AI agents to augment the experience.

Revolut has already started down this path.

The company has publicly discussed deploying internal AI tools and building its own capabilities to automate operations and accelerate product development. It has also recruited aggressively in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The ambition is not simply to have AI features but to become an AI-first organisation.

By the early 2030s, a customer might no longer think about accounts, cards or loans. Instead, they may simply tell their financial agent:

“I want to buy a house in five years, retire at sixty and spend two months a year abroad.”

The AI will continuously optimise savings, investments, insurance and financing to make those goals happen. It will explain decisions, negotiate with other AI agents and execute transactions automatically.

That is what AI-native banking looks like.

So, what will Revolut look like ten years from now?

The first thing to understand is that banking itself is disappearing into software. The winners of the next decade will be the companies that abstract away the complexity of finance and turn money into an intelligent utility.

Revolut has spent the last decade building the foundations for exactly that. It has expanded globally, secured banking licences, built wealth products, entered lending and mortgages, and invested heavily in artificial intelligence and its own foundation models.

By 2036, Revolut will be serving 300 million customers, triple the number today. It will be present in over one hundred countries and will be one of the few truly global retail financial institutions. Its valuation could exceed $1 trillion, putting it alongside the world’s largest financial and technology companies.

Yet customers will never open their app. Instead, their app will be part of wearable systems from clothes to glasses to vehicles and refrigerators (I’ve had that vision since the 1990s).

Mortgages may become entirely different. Rather than a thirty-year loan from one bank, customers will access dynamically priced housing finance assembled from multiple funding pools and adjusted continuously based upon income, assets and market conditions.

Payments will be largely. Stablecoins, tokenised deposits and programmable money will settle value instantly. Cross-border transfers will just be a background process. The distinction between payments, banking and wealth management will have disappeared.

Business banking is more important for Revolut in the future, as this is where their ambitions could build millions of SMEs on their ecosystems running payroll, treasury, invoicing and working capital through Revolut’s platform and infrastructure. The company could evolve into a financial operating system for both consumers and businesses.

But success creates problems.

By 2036, Revolut may become systemically important. Governments and central banks will not see it as a fintech but as critical infrastructure. Regulation will become more intrusive. The company will face capital requirements similar to the world’s largest banks. It will be expected to survive cyberattacks, geopolitical tensions and AI risks.

Competition will also come from unexpected places. OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Apple and AI-native startups could all offer autonomous financial agents. The battle will no longer be between banks and fintechs. It will be between ecosystems.

The greatest risk is complexity. Revolut became successful because it removed friction. Companies often fail when they try to become everything to everyone. Maintaining simplicity whilst managing hundreds of millions of customers will be its hardest challenge.

Also, by 2036, people will still use Visa and Mastercard, governments will still issue money, and banks will still exist, but many consumers will experience finance through a layer sitting above all of them. That layer could be Revolut.

In other words, Revolut’s future is not to become the next HSBC, even though they have copied HSBC’s style by having their branding all over the world’s major airports, but no. It won’t be HSBC. It will be Android for finance. Invisible, intelligent and everywhere.