Revolut had nearly 2 million customers in April 2018, when it raised $250m in a series C round, and it said it was adding 6,000 to 8,000 more every day. By September 2026 it was serving more than 80 million, a more than fortyfold rise in under eight and a half years.
Its annual reports and press releases date the payment products and licences that got it there: currency exchange priced under the banks, a checkout and card terminals for merchants, free transfers that turned customers into recruiters, and banking licences that followed the customers in Europe and went ahead of them in newer markets. Those records also show where the plans made in 2018 ran late.
A currency app that relied on its cards
Revolut began in the UK in 2015, according to its 2025 annual report, “with transfer and foreign exchange services that were faster and cheaper than those of legacy banks.” Founded by Nik Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko, the company raised $15m in a series A in 2016 and $66m in a series B the following year, when Revolut Business launched in the EEA.
Cards paid for that early growth. In 2019 card and interchange income brought in £74.0m of the group’s £166.0m revenue, about 45%, which turned 2020 into a stress test. Retail payments revenue fell by more than 40% in a single month as travel stopped and lockdowns spread, international payment volumes dropped by two-thirds from their pre-pandemic level, and second-quarter revenue came in 12% below the first quarter’s.
The company answered on two fronts. It halted marketing, paused hiring and cut third-party costs, and it leaned on products that did not need anyone to travel. Subscription income rose from £39.5m in 2019 to £75.2m, and adjusted revenue in the second half of 2020 ran 41% above the first half. “We increased our efforts to diversify our revenues, reducing the reliance on interchange and international travel,” the 2020 report said.
Revolut also crossed to the other side of a card payment in 2020. It launched in-house card processing for Mastercard and Visa, began a beta of its own card-acquiring platform and opened merchant acquiring to business customers.
Revolut Pay and Revolut Reader followed the cards
Shops and websites need no agreement with Revolut to take its customers’ money. The company’s cards run on Visa and Mastercard, and its sterling accounts have their own sort codes; pounds sent from them to other UK accounts typically go through the Faster Payments Service, the company says. The seller sees a card payment or a bank transfer, not Revolut.
Lists that group payment methods by type show where that leaves the brand. Payout methods for casino sites fast withdrawal come under three headings, and gambling.com puts PayPal and Neteller under e-wallets. With the other two, bank transfers and debit cards, the money ends in a bank account, either one linked through Open Banking or the one the card draws on.
A Revolut card is one of those debit cards, and a Revolut sterling account can be the bank account under either heading. The brand therefore turns up in two of the three, though none is named after it.
Under-18s may not gamble at the casino sites themselves, and their Gambling Commission licences do not extend beyond Great Britain. The British helplines for problem gambling charge nothing and keep no office hours. Dial 0808 8020 133 to speak to the National Gambling Helpline in England and Scotland, or 0808 2819 265 to contact the NHS Wales helpline.
Revolut Pay, a one-click checkout for merchants’ websites launched in 2022, makes the brand itself a payment method. At launch, existing customers paid through it from their balance or a preferred card, and shoppers without an account could use a Mastercard or Visa card from another provider, then were offered a cash reward to open one. In 2025, 4.8 million Revolut customers used it, and the volume of payments the group accepted for merchants rose 228%.
In shops, Revolut Reader arrived in 2022 as the company’s first hardware for in-person payments, and its point-of-sale device, Revolut Terminal, had reached 19 countries by the time of the 2025 report, nine of them added that year. In late September 2026 the company piloted Revolut Pay with Smile, which it called the UK’s first in-store facial recognition checkout, in three London cafés, with no processing fees for merchants.
The customers who recruited customers
Sending money from one Revolut account to another is free and takes seconds, according to the company, so every new customer had a reason to bring in friends. Four in five people who signed up in 2022 arrived organically or through someone they knew, and that year’s report said the average customer knew 87 other people on the app.
Paid marketing grew alongside that pull rather than replacing it. Revolut budgeted more than £100m for marketing in 2022. Its investment in sales, advertising and marketing then passed £300m in 2023 and reached £463m in 2024. As spending rose, the proportion of new customers who joined organically or by referral eased to more than 70% in 2023 and more than 65% in 2024.
Steam keeps sellers’ money inside its store. Sales on its Community Market pay out into a Steam Wallet, and that balance buys games and items but cannot be withdrawn to a bank or a card. Jasonaires Lowenthal’s comparison of Steam market fees and trade holds calls this the walled garden problem.
Revolut built its network without that wall. Its customers can spend their balances outside the app or send them on to another bank, so bringing in a friend locks neither person in.
The filed figures, 2019 to 2025
The group’s annual reports supply every number in the table, and for 2019 and 2021 the revenue and pre-tax results are the restated figures from the following year’s accounts.
| Year | Customers | Revenue | Profit or loss before tax |
| 2019 | 7.8m | £166.0m | Loss of £107.7m |
| 2020 | 11.4m | £222.1m | Loss of £207.9m |
| 2021 | 16.4m | £637.9m | Profit of £39.8m |
| 2022 | 26.2m | £922.5m | Loss of £25.4m |
| 2023 | 38.0m | £1,797.9m | Profit of £437.8m |
| 2024 | 52.5m | £3,090.0m | Profit of £1,088.7m |
| 2025 | 68.3m | £4,515.8m | Profit of £1,713.3m |
The customer column uses a later yardstick than the early reports did. Revolut’s report for 2020 recorded almost 14.5 million retail customers at the end of that year, defining a customer as anyone who had accepted the terms and conditions, while the 2025 report’s timeline gives 11.4 million for 2020. The company grew quickly under both definitions, but comparisons across years, the fortyfold one above among them, are approximate.
Pre-tax results fell in 2020 and again in 2022, years in which the customer count still went up. Revenue rose by more than £280m in 2022, yet administrative expenses climbed from £380.1m to £667.1m, and the previous year’s profit became a loss. The group returned to profit in 2023 and has increased it in each year since.
The largest stream of 2025 revenue, card payments, made up only 22.2%, ahead of interest income at 21.6%, subscriptions at 15.7%, wealth at 14.7% and foreign exchange at 13.4%. Foreign exchange, where the company started, came last of those five. Business accounts produced 16% of total income, and eleven product lines each earned more than £100m.
Licences trailed the customers in Europe and led them in Latin America
The 2018 funding announcement planned an international expansion “starting with the United States, Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia in 2018.” The company’s own timeline puts Singapore in 2019 and the United States in 2020, so the launches ran behind that plan.
Europe set the first pattern. In December 2018 the company secured a European banking licence through the Bank of Lithuania, which passporting rules let it use across the EEA. It claimed 3 million users by then and said it had been opening 8,000 to 10,000 accounts a day for the previous 12 months. Banking services followed in Lithuania and Poland in 2020, and in 2022 the group launched Revolut Bank in 30 EEA countries.
Its home market took longer, with a UK banking licence granted with restrictions in 2024 and the restrictions lifted after mobilisation in 2026. The United States and Switzerland still follow the European order. In the US the company holds conditional approval for a national bank charter from the Comptroller of the Currency, and the FDIC and the Federal Reserve have yet to give theirs before a proposed 2027 launch. In Switzerland it has applied to FINMA for a banking licence while already serving more than 1.3 million customers there, and it says the outcome is open.
In Latin America the order reversed. The group opened its bank in Mexico at the start of 2026, describing it as its first outside Europe, and that bank already serves more than 500,000 retail customers. In Colombia it received a licence to operate from the Superintendencia Financiera, bringing its banking licences to six, with around 200,000 people on a waiting list before launch. In Argentina the central bank approved its purchase of Banco Cetelem Argentina, and more than 150,000 people have joined the waiting list there.
The price ran ahead of the customer target
Investors paid more at every step. The 2018 series C valued the company at $1.7bn, five times its valuation of less than a year earlier. TechCrunch reported a series D at $5.5bn in February 2020, when the company had more than 10 million customers; an $800m series E valued it at $33bn in 2021, and an employee share sale put it at $45bn in 2024. A secondary share sale completed in 2025 implied $75bn, according to that year’s annual report.
A further secondary share sale was under way in July 2026, a spokesperson confirmed to Reuters, and a person familiar with it put the valuation at roughly $115bn. The company declined to comment on the details and said it would give an update once the sale was complete.
The customer target has slipped by about four years. In 2018 the company aimed for 100 million customers within five years, and by the end of 2023 it had 38.0 million. Revolut says it remains on track for 100 million by mid-2027, and its longer goal pairs that number with 100 markets, against the 40 it operates in now. Reaching 100 million from more than 80 million in September means winning fewer than 20 million customers in about nine months; across the whole of 2025 the retail count rose by 15.8 million.
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