“Ascenseur cassé” reads a sign next to the broken lift. Most walls are covered in protective foam and plywood; others have cables spilling from holes in the plasterboard. Revolut’s new EU headquarters in central Paris is ambitious and a work in progress, much like the bank itself.
It is a fair bet that Nik Storonsky, the intense Russian-born entrepreneur who cofounded Revolut,12 years ago and remains its hard-charging chief executive, likes the theatrics of holding court in such a setting.
Revolut has to some degree transformed Irish banking, adding more than 3 million customers and becoming the main day-to-day tool for people sending money to each other, splitting bills and other relatively low key payments, undercutting the domestic banks.
He is located in the ballroom-sized splendour of the building’s minimalist second floor. The 42-year-old still sports his signature beach bum blond bob, a clue to his passion for kitesurfing. But, belying every time I’ve met him before, he is dressed not in a collarless top and slacks, but in a sharp black suit, crisp white shirt, bright red tie and the shiniest shoes imaginable.
RM Block
He quickly dispels any suggestion he has dressed up for the interview: “I had a meeting with the Banque de France,” he explains, drily or shyly, or both. Just last month the French authorities granted Revolut a banking licence, giving a reputational upgrade to the pan-EU authorisation it has had for nearly a decade from Lithuania.
It has been an upbeat few months in Revolut’s rollercoaster preteen years. In March, after a five-year wait, the group – now with 80 million customers across 40 countries – finally got bank authorisation in its home UK market. The recent French licence was closely followed by a green light from the OCC, the key US regulator.
Along the way, Storonsky has been infamously rude about regulators’ lethargic approval processes, particularly in the UK, but today he appears to feel vindicated. No wonder: Revolut, far and away Europe’s most successful start-up, is now valued at $115 billion (€100 billion). And he himself is worth $33 billion.
What can Europe learn from the bank’s rise? “Almost anything is possible,” says Storonsky, without missing a beat. “Traditionally, the thinking was that all the largest and best companies are built in the US, [in] California. It’s probably still the case if you look at AI, all these new companies – Anthropic, OpenAI and so on. But it shows that it is possible to build a large company out of Europe as well.”
Yes, he says, access to capital is trickier, regulation is tougher and markets are fragmented. On the plus side, there is a “very good quality of talent ... which is actually much cheaper compared to ... the US, especially California”.
The European way is also more eclectic: Revolut’s 15,000 staff hail from 110 different countries, Storonsky says.
Yet geopolitical fragmentation – from the Russia-Ukraine war to the Middle East conflict and the heightened acrimony between the US and China – has hampered his mission to build “the world’s first truly global bank”, by which he means a consumer bank present in more than 100 countries. “In the financial services business, if you’ve got political tensions, especially with sanctions, you cannot do a lot of things in many, many countries.”
Vetting customers has been particularly challenging, he admits – a nod to the spats Revolut has had with the authorities over the years.
Nikolay Storonsky was born to clever parents (his Ukrainian father was a physics whizz at Gazprom) in Soviet 1980s Russia. He renounced his Russian citizenship in 2022, having become a British citizen in 2013, but his early years shaped his rebellious entrepreneurialism from the off.
“In a socialist system,” he says, “you can’t really run a business or own anything. And I think it actually shaped a lot of young people into being very entrepreneurial and actually building businesses. When you are restricted from doing something, you actually have a lot of desire to do that something.”
Education – a physics degree and economics and physics postgrads in Moscow – gave him the chance of a financial career in London, where he became an equity derivatives trader in 2007. This time it was the capitalist system that proved flawed. His first employer was Lehman Brothers, which collapsed the year after his arrival. His second was Credit Suisse, now also defunct. Both taught him lessons.
The level of risk being taken at Lehman alarmed him. “At times the trading book would be down by hundreds of millions of dollars within one day,” he says. “For me, it was extremely risky.” At Credit Suisse, he says, the main issue was infighting.
“What I really learnt [from] this experience is you just shouldn’t take a risk in complex things. I think that also influenced a lot of my direction in building my business.”
Flush with funds saved from his years in investment banking, he launched Revolut in 2015 as a challenger to traditional – and notoriously price-gouging – foreign exchange groups. Storonsky is fervent in expressing his mission to do to mainstream banks what he already did to greedy bureaus de change.
“In many markets, because there is no competition, prices for banking services are high. Friction to have an account is very high. Product innovation is extremely low.” Once Revolut shakes that up, says Storonsky, people will get cheaper, better banking without the hassle of branches or call centres. In some markets, such as Ireland, four-in-five people already use Revolut, although becoming their primary bank is another challenge.
The trick will be to do all that while heeding the risk management lessons from Lehman and Credit Suisse. In a retail bank, that means maximising fee revenue and minimising an activity that has always been at the heart of banking: lending.
Revolut’s loan-to-deposit ratio, a key metric of any deposit-taking lender, is an unusually low 6 per cent. (The typical bank hovers around 100 per cent.) But in line with his low-risk, capital-light mantra, Storonsky insists he will go nowhere near the norm. “We don’t plan to have exposure of more than 10-20 per cent,” he says. Even those loans that Revolut does bring on to its balance sheet will be sold again in whole, or through securitisations. The model, he says, is “to have effectively zero risk for the business”.
It seems to be working. He says Revolut’s return on equity is 40-50 per cent (once excess capital is deducted) – double the tally of his best-performing rivals. There have been whispers of going public at a valuation of up to $200 billion within two years, with a possible dual listing in New York and London.
Like most fintechs, Revolut has the advantage of up-to-date technology, unsullied by mergers, thanks to organic expansion. “If you look historically at Citigroup or other large banks, the way they expanded internationally, they were buying other banks,” says Storonsky. Already antiquated technology was further weakened by the messy amalgam of acquisitions. “Systems, which don’t really talk to each other, [are] unmanageable.”
It is true Revolut has avoided some of the pitfalls that have troubled larger rivals as they expanded in global retail banking, before scandals and poor performance prompted retrenchment. But I can’t help smiling at the irony of Storonsky’s comments: if there is one bank more than any other that has been exposed for shortcomings in its controls, amid breakneck expansion, it is Revolut.
From 2021 to 2023, it was embroiled in an audit dispute over the origin of some revenue. Last year, it was fined for insufficient anti-money laundering controls. And just hours before our interview in Paris, the bank fell foul of a damaging scam when it handed over the personal information of hundreds of wealthy clients to cybercriminals posing as Italian government officials, who have threatened to sell the data unless the bank pays a $3 million ransom.
Yet attitudes to Revolut have clearly shifted. Europe’s policymakers have become comfortable with the group’s quick-fire ways, perhaps finally buying Storonsky’s pitch that he is as close as the continent can get to the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, his heroes. Popular outrage at his wealth, pay packages, changeable tax residency (London, Dubai, then London again) and an indulgent taste in yachts (he was recently sued over an allegedly unpaid middleman’s bill) appears muted, too.
Just don’t expect him to slow down. He is particularly excited by the prospect of enabling other entrepreneurs to follow in his footsteps. He has launched two venture capital funds (dubbed QuantumLight I and II), worth a combined $850 million, seeding them with $100 million of his own money, but with a Storonsky twist: much of the investment analysis is done by AI. “I think it’s definitely possible to invest based on the science and data rather than human judgment.” Returns, he says, are “in the top 5 per cent in the world”. AI is increasingly at the heart of Revolut’s operations, too: “We use it for inquiries, customer support, financial crime and cross-selling.” (He expresses no concern about the technology, despite mounting global nervousness.)
What about becoming a serial entrepreneur in his own right, like Bezos or Musk? “I do have certain projects on the side that I’m driving and financing as well.” Though he is coy about the details, he admits to being “very interested in health tech”.
By the end of our interview, Storonsky has swapped seriousness for extolling the joys of kitesurfing. Just before walking off towards the broken elevator, he explains the appeal of the waves as an antidote to his high-octane, tech-filled business life. “For me it’s like meditation. The wind, the sea – you go with them without actually thinking.” --Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
