Revolut CEO: “Country by Country, We’ll Secure Banking and Trading Licences Around the World”

London / January 29th, 2019 - Revolut’s CEO has unveiled his plan to build a global licencing team that will be responsible for securing banking, trading and credit licences in new and existing markets, starting with the United Kingdom and the United States.

The move will be a first in the fintech industry, as the high growth scaleup looks to set a precedent with regards to acquiring new licences around the world.

The new team will be responsible for delivering the entire end to end licensing process - from liaison with decision-makers, partners and regulators, through to the execution of specific deliverables required to obtain each licence. This will enable Revolut to move forward with the next phase of their global expansion plans as they aim to become a truly global bank.

“Building this team will be no easy task. We’re ideally looking for people who have previous experience in securing either a banking or trading licence, and they should be quite technical and be comfortable working in a very fast-paced environment”, said Nik Storonsky, Founder & CEO of Revolut.

The initial stage of hiring will focus on building a high-functioning licensing team. The roles that make up the experienced core team will include a Capital, Liquidity and Financial Modelling Manager, a Licence Business Planning Manager, a Licence Project Manager for Banking, a Licence Project Manager for Trading and a Global Head of Licence Operations. This will allow Revolut to scale at speed as they expand globally in 2019, with a team focused solely on acquiring licences.

Having recently secured a European banking licence, Revolut is pushing ahead in their mission to become the Amazon of banking. With nearly 4 million customers, it is one of a growing number of fintech firms that is gaining banking licences with the aim of enticing customers away from the traditional high street banks.

With the UK due to leave the EU on 29th March, Revolut is keeping an eye on any Brexit developments which could affect the passporting of their EU licence.

“Brexit is obviously a little bit of an inconvenience for us, but we’ve never been a reactive company. That’s why we’ve now secured an EMI licence in both the UK and Europe, and now that we have a European banking licence in place, our next step is to secure a UK banking licence.”

“From the talent side, we’re not seeing any of signs that people not wanting to relocate to London, and we’re proactively working with government ministers on lobbying for a specialised Visa for high calibre software engineers and data scientists, so that it’ll be far easier for this kind of talent to get into the country. If the UK is to remain the tech capital of Europe, we need to make it easy and fast for the best talent to come in.”

While the company is initially focused on acquiring licences in the United Kingdom and the United States, Storonsky has made it clear that he intends to hire licencing teams and obtain licences in all of their future expansion markets. The move will see Revolut become a licenced bank and broker in multiple international markets.

ABOUT REVOLUT

Revolut was launched in July 2015 by former Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank investment bankers, Nik Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko, as a digital alternative to the big banks. While the fintech initially drew in customers by letting them spend and transfer money abroad with the interbank exchange rate, the company has since attracted over three million customers in Europe with its spending overviews, budgeting controls, savings features and cryptocurrency exchange.

To date, Revolut has raised approximately $340 million in investments, from notable venture capital firms including Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Balderton Capital and DST Global. The high growth fintech is currently opening over 8,000 new current accounts each day and processing over $4 billion in volumes each month.