Revolut profit booms after poaching record customers from high street banks
Revolut revealed a major boom in its bottom line on Tuesday morning after the fintech giant poached a record amount of customers from its high street rivals.
The $75bn digital banking titan posted a 57 per cent surge in group-wide profit to £1.7bn.
It came as retail customers expanded by a record 16m as the London-born challenger continued to park its tanks on the lawns of the traditional global banking elite. Total customers swelled to 68.3m.
The growth helped accelerate the fintech’s revenue 46 per cent, hitting £4.5bn. Subscriptions served as a major source of this with the area having the highest year-on-year revenue increase – and outperforming headline profit and revenue growth – at 67 per cent to £708m.
Card payments increased 45 per cent to £1bn.
In the bank’s business arm, customers grew 23 per cent closing in on the 800m mark. Revolut Business accounted for £277bn of total transaction value after a boom in markets such as Singapore, Australia and the US.
CityAM reported on Tuesday morning that the bank was gearing up for hiring spree across its financial hubs with trading and wealth set to take a focus.
The firm is hiring for a product owner, where the job advertisement also notes “experience in margin trading or trading platforms” would be “nice to have”.
Margin trading – also known as leveraged trading – is understood to be an area of potential expansion for Revolut, with the area serving as a high-growth and potentially high-profit for lenders, allowing banks to earn both commission and interest on cash dished out.
Revolut to ramp up fight to big banks after licence win
The fresh financial results come weeks after Revolut announced it had bagged a full-fat UK banking licence following a four-year wait for the final green light from the watchdog.
The amount of balances held at the bank jumped 66 per cent to £50.2bn in the last year.
It comes as analysts forecast a “deposit war” after Revolut clinched its UK banking permit with incumbents Lloyds and Natwest predicted to be the top targets.
The UK’s big four banks – Natwest, Lloyds, HSBC and Barclays – currently hold around 60 per cent of the industry’s £2.5 trillion deposits.
Bloomberg Intelligence calculates that every £10bn of current account outflows from the UK’s largest lenders could lead to as much as £375 million in annual net interest income erosion – a four per cent dent to the expected profits of Lloyds and Natwest this year.
Nik Storonsky, Revolut’s founder and top boss, said: “As we transition into a truly global bank, we are proving that our technology-driven operating model continues to drive rapid expansion and record profitability”.
In its financial report the fintech juggernaut said it “remains focused” on its next milestone of clocking 100m customers by mid-2027.