00:18:08 · Aman Narain, Zubin Vandrevala
[00:18:08] S0: Which is the real question. Is this the new way of running a company, Zubin, where dashboards and AI replace the middle layer, if you'd like, and the chief executive talks to everybody all at once? Or is it that span of control that works right up until it doesn't? [00:18:25] S1: Yeah. And Jensen's version, just to kind of get us on the same page for those who follow along, because everyone hears the same thing at the same time. Storonsky runs through one chair on a Monday, same span, different wiring. [00:18:38] S0: The stakes are very different. You know, in a chip company, a red cell is a delay. In a bank, a red cell could be a regulatory incident, a detailed Monday weekly business review, and, you know, endless, you know, meetings and debate. [00:18:53] S1: It's phystech chalkboard run weekly on the whole company. [00:18:57] S0: And, you know, I'll defend Storonsky because every bank I've worked in have had those meetings I just talked about. The difference is that we found the red cell six weeks after the quarter end in a deck that took a fortnight to build, and nobody remembered who owned it. You know that. You worked at a bank. [00:19:15] S1: I remember those days. Yes. Yes. [00:19:17] S0: He's compressed all of that quarter into a week and and the deck into a screen. That's not cruelty. That's that's low latency. [00:19:26] S1: Latency for the number. Right? What's the latency for the person who owns that number? [00:19:31] S0: Which is, I guess, where the karma comes in.
00:19:31 · Aman Narain, Zubin Vandrevala
[00:19:31] S0: Which is, I guess, where the karma comes in. [00:19:33] S1: Yeah. So let's talk about karma. Built in 2020 in the annual report, points across more than 30 compliance workflows offer a late policy, a delayed suspicious activity report, a missing customer document. The scores roll up to the departments and become a multiplier on the team's bonus. So, compliance isn't a memo, it's priced into your colleagues' pay. [00:19:55] S0: You know, I saw this internal data. There was a report, didn't see the internal data. Saw the report on it that said that the adherence rose 25%. [00:20:04] S1: That's pretty wild. Right? Like, it measures whether report was filed on time, not whether it was right. A bank that has to gamify caution has told you its default setting. [00:20:12] S0: Or it's told you something about every bank, and this is the one indelicate enough to staple it to the bonus. I'll add what I hear firsthand because, as I said, I have friends who work there, exhilarating brilliant people with an absolutely ruthless mindset. For your first few years, you're literally only as good as your last month. And after that, it's your last quarter. Man, that sounds exhausting. Yeah. Very different from Google that we grew up at. But the cadence at which they deliver is an order of magnitude faster than banking, and that's the real competitive advantage as long as they don't screw it up. [00:20:56] S1: Let's park that caveat because we'll need it for that... The breach.
00:20:56 · Zubin Vandrevala, Aman Narain
[00:20:56] S1: Let's park that caveat because we'll need it for that... The breach. [00:21:01] S0: Yeah. And so let's talk about hiring then. I think it's the purest part of his machine. In the earlier years, he personally interviewed every engineering and product hire. It was like a massive quantified live problem solving exercise. [00:21:16] S1: Yeah. And, like, calculate interchange across fragmented corridors, redesign a database schema to cut latency on a whiteboard now. Fault in, you're out within minutes in the room. [00:21:29] S0: Yeah. I mean, you could imagine a physics major kind of like, you know, Elon's probably the same. Right? [00:21:35] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, and and the defenders aren't paid to defend. Right? Alan Chan, employee number five, compares it to an Olympic training camp. Right? The 150,000,000,000 secondary made hundreds of employees millionaires in London, in Krakow, in Vilnius. [00:21:54] S0: Hundreds of millionaires in Krakow. That's a class mobility story, which I don't think many companies could ever tell. [00:22:02] S1: Yeah. And the number isn't anonymous. Right? Between twenty seventeen and 2024, five chief risk officers and four chief compliance officers averaging under eighteen months each. During the years, the PRA were reviewing the license. Right? Reported reason, a European that lost an argument with compliance could take it straight to the cheap exec. [00:22:23] S0: And the old chart that removes bureaucracy also removes the one layer whose job is to slow it down.
00:22:23 · Aman Narain, Zubin Vandrevala
[00:22:23] S0: And the old chart that removes bureaucracy also removes the one layer whose job is to slow it down. [00:22:28] S1: Right. And here's the half of the machine critics skip, and it's the half I spend my work life in. Right? It ships and scales at the speed banks don't. So a speed round, let's talk about it. Right? Customers, 20,000,000 when it launched its checkout in 2020, 55,000,000 by mid twenty twenty five, 80,000,000 now plus 800,000 businesses. [00:22:51] S0: Four times the customers in four years. And and let's talk about transactions, 590,000,000 in a month at the end of twenty twenty three, 940,000,000 just a year later. The UK, 9,000,000 customers by mid twenty twenty four. 13,000,000 this spring. [00:23:12] S1: Right. And licenses a full UK bank in in March, France in August, conditional approval for the American Bank this month, and Israel reported in its final stages. Most banks would take decades to collect that set. [00:23:25] S0: You know, and I think the importance of that number section of ours is it's not a growth curve. It's just a different clock speed. In most banks that we've known, a new product spends longer in committee than Revolut spends launching a country. [00:23:40] S1: Let's talk about the products, right? Check out first, Revolut One Click, Biometrics, One Card Number Typed In, launched in 2022 for British and European merchants, now live in The UK, Europe, Singapore, and Australia.
00:23:40 · Zubin Vandrevala, Aman Narain
[00:23:40] S1: Let's talk about the products, right? Check out first, Revolut One Click, Biometrics, One Card Number Typed In, launched in 2022 for British and European merchants, now live in The UK, Europe, Singapore, and Australia. [00:23:55] S0: You know, it's a bit... It's like an odd thing for a bank to bill. Banks issue the card. They don't design the checkout. Right? What's up with that? [00:24:03] S1: That's the point. Right? Like, he owns the account, the card, the acquiring, and now the button. Every layer where a fee usually leads to somebody else. [00:24:10] S0: So given given you're the payments guru, why don't you explain to people who don't live in checkout first? [00:24:16] S1: Right. Like, in simple terms, right? Like, when you pay revenue, pay for your from your revenue balance, the money moves inside Revolut's own books. There's no card scheme in the middle, taking a card, no issuer, and acquires splitting the fees. The merchant pays Revolut, and Revolut keeps a lot. And here's the clever part nobody talks about. Merchants can run promotions inside the Revolut app to those 80,000,000 customers and pay only when a sale happens. This isn't a payment method. It's almost, I would argue, an advertising network with a checkout attached. [00:24:49] S0: Which is the lesson every big platform eventually learns. Right? The checkout is where the advertising money is. Then he did something no neobank is supposed to do. He built ATMs.
00:24:49 · Aman Narain, Zubin Vandrevala
[00:24:49] S0: Which is the lesson every big platform eventually learns. Right? The checkout is where the advertising money is. Then he did something no neobank is supposed to do. He built ATMs. [00:25:00] S1: This is wild. Right? Like, was it, what, June 2025, Spain announced on the fourth, and the first machines were live at a Barcelona music festival that same week. 50 in Madrid and Barcelona, up to 200 planned. A two third inch touchscreen, free withdrawals for customers, FX at the app's rate, and it prints you a physical card on the spot. There's one in Milan Airport doing the same. [00:25:26] S0: In one of the most cash heavy economies in Europe, cash is over 60% of point of sale payments there, according to the Bank of Spain. [00:25:34] S1: Yeah. And this spring, he announced his first physical store in Barcelona, but no means a traditional bank branch. The company says and plans for a private bank reported about, what, £500,000 minimum? [00:25:47] S0: So I think the branchless bank is quite clever. It's about building branches and a private bank. It's not a contradiction. I think it's part of that ladder. You don't sell wealth management to somebody who has never seen you. Every bank I've worked with treated the branch as a cost to shrink. He's building one like a billboard. [00:26:08] S1: Yeah. So, Aman, talk to me. Why private banking of all things? Because