Nik Storonsky

Revolut's Nik Storonsky on building the first global bank

Nik Storonsky built Revolut from a single currency card into a licensed digital bank serving more than 40 countries, and he still calls his goal the first truly global bank. The card was free and paid for by the interchange earned when customers spent, so the company grew by word of mouth for five years without a marketing budget. Regulation sets the pace of expansion now, making the US licence and a likely IPO the milestones that matter.

Takeaways

• Revolut started as a no-fee currency card. The first product let people spend abroad at the interbank rate, saving $50 to $70 per $1,000. It grew into a licensed bank offering banking, trading, crypto, borrowing and travel booking in one app across more than 40 countries.
• Free exchange is funded by card interchange. Revolut charges no exchange fee and earns the two to three percent merchant fee on card spending instead. That model built scale, and one in five European adults and four out of five Irish adults now carry a Revolut card.
• Banking licences are the real bottleneck. Revolut holds a European banking licence regulated by the ECB and a UK licence regulated by the PRA, plus licences in Mexico and Colombia. Its US application should take up to 12 months, against an official target of four.
• The US product replaces several vendors. An American company might use Stripe for acquiring and JPMorgan for business banking, plus separate providers for payouts and payroll. Revolut plans business accounts that bundle payments, banking, credit, treasury and acquiring in one product.
• Quantum Light picks startups with machine learning. Storonsky started it about three years ago, frustrated with VC crowd thinking. The first fund was $250m, roughly a quarter his own money, and he says 30 to 40 percent returns put it among the top four or five percent of funds worldwide.
• An IPO is likely in about two years. Storonsky says Revolut will probably be ready to go public in roughly two years, market permitting, and may run another secondary share sale first. Secondaries happen every year or two, and he argues public companies are more trusted than private ones.

How Revolut was built

1. He started alone in 2013, built the product himself, put in about $500,000 of his own savings and took no salary for two years.
2. He sold the first cards in person to friends, family and strangers, and spent nothing on marketing for five or six years.
3. He made his first hire a co-founder around 2017 or 2018, mainly so he could recruit engineers with the co-founder title.
4. Instead of branches, he built trust through brand advertising in European airports, and runs the company on five values that start with never settle and dream team.