For more than five years, the Revolut founder behind Europe's most valuable startup waited for his home regulator to let him run a proper bank.
Revolut applied in January 2021, and banking licences normally arrive within twelve months.
This one arrived in March 2026.
We believe that exact gap holds the whole story.
The company grew faster than the rules around it, and the regulators spent years asking whether the controls had caught up.
Who was right to wait, and who was right to run?
The Trader Who Left Credit Suisse to Build a Currency Card
So who founded Revolut?
Nik Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko did, in London, with an app that launched in July 2015.
Storonsky had worked as an equity derivatives trader at Lehman Brothers and then Credit Suisse before leaving banking in 2013.
Yatsenko, a software engineer who had worked at Deutsche Bank, joined as co-founder and chief technology officer and by June 2026, it had served more than 75 million customers across 40 markets.
We think the Nik Storonsky Revolut story is about permission as much as it is about growth.
Five Years of Waiting to Be Called a Bank
The Revolut UK banking licence was meant to clear in about a year.
The Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) granted a restricted licence in July 2024 and placed Revolut in a mobilisation phase, with deposits capped at £50,000. Revolut described it in its own terms.
“the largest and most complex mobilisation ever undertaken in the UK.”— Revolut spokesperson, as reported by Reuters
By October 2025 the process had passed fourteen months.
The Bank of England wanted assurances that Revolut's risk controls, from anti-money laundering to IT systems, could match its overseas expansion.
Approval would also set a precedent abroad, so the Revolut UK banking licence carried more weight than one market.
Did the delay protect customers, or simply punish scale?
The Revolut banking licence delay ended on 11 March 2026, after roughly twenty months in mobilisation. Until then Revolut could not offer credit to its 13 million UK customers.
The Warning Signs Arrived Years Before the Licence
Three episodes show why Revolut's regulatory scrutiny never fully faded.
In 2019 the Telegraph reported that Revolut had switched off an automated sanctions screening system for three months in 2018.
Revolut said the new system produced too many false positives, that existing controls ran in its place, and that a review found every transaction compliant. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) replied that it expects firms to hold proper systems and controls at all times.
In March 2023, Revolut published its 2021 accounts months late, its auditor, BDO, could not verify £477m of revenue because of how the company's IT systems were built and issued a qualified opinion.
In April 2025 the Bank of Lithuania fined Revolut Bank €3.5m for weaknesses in monitoring customers and transactions, it was the largest penalty of its kind that central bank had issued.
No money laundering was confirmed, and the findings concerned existing controls. Revolut's EU banking runs through its Lithuania banking licence. For comparison, the FCA fined Starling Bank £29m in 2024 over its financial crime controls.
We think the pattern, rather than any single case, is what the PRA was weighing.
A compliance culture takes years to prove, and Revolut had been asking regulators to take it on trust.
“…we tried to short-cut our banking licences.”— Nik Storonsky, speaking at the opening of Revolut's Canary Wharf headquarters, September 2025, as reported by the Financial Times
We think that admission matters more than any fine, because Revolut founder Nik Storonsky is saying the shortcut was the mistake.
What Does a $115 Billion Valuation Buy a Founder?
The Revolut valuation 2026 story moved quickly.
A share sale in November 2025 priced the company at $75bn, a secondary sale in July 2026 priced it at $115bn, or $2,017 a share, which put Revolut above Barclays. Forbes then put Nik Storonsky's net worth at $18.8bn on its 2026 list, any Nik Storonsky net worth figure rests on private prices, no stock market has tested.
The fortune now sits on a Gulf list.
Storonsky moved his residence from the UK to the UAE in October 2025, and Forbes ranks him among the UAE's richest residents.
Does a founder owe the country that licensed him anything beyond compliance?
Why Does the Banker of the Year Want a Wall Street Listing?
In June 2026 a jury of European financial journalists named him European Banker of the Year 2025, the first founder of a neobank to win.
The Revolut IPO 2028 timeline is his own, he has said the listing is about two years away and that a US primary listing was always the target because of its deep liquidity.
Revolut has told investors it is aiming for $150bn to $200bn at listing.
“We are a bank, and trust is critical for a bank.” — Nik Storonsky, Bloomberg’s The David Rubenstein Show, April 2026
Trust is what five years of waiting tested.
A listed Revolut would answer to shareholders every quarter as well as to the PRA. Will it slow down to meet both? Every Revolut founder story so far ends with speed winning and the rules catching up, so what would a chapter look like in which the rules arrive first?
What we’d still like to ask
Looking back at who founded Revolut and how quickly it grew, what did Storonsky and Yatsenko disagree about while the licence kept slipping? What did the Revolut UK banking licence process change inside the company, beyond its systems? And how does he square a Wall Street listing with a PRA that now supervises Revolut as a bank?
Editorial note
EP+ is an independent publication, and this piece involved no payment or sponsorship. We would welcome a conversation with Revolut's co-founders and will publish any response from Revolut's press team in full.
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Sources: Revolut’s UK licence application (January 2021) and mobilisation exit (11 March 2026): RTÉ, CNBC, Bloomberg, Tech.eu, Sharecast via Hargreaves Lansdown; Financial Times via todayinthemarkets.com. Licence delays, risk controls and Canary Wharf remarks: Financial Times via the Irish Times, Reuters via RTÉ, TechCrunch, PYMNTS and FStech (October 2025). 2018 sanctions screening: Bloomberg (1 March 2019), American Banker and The Block (2019). BDO’s qualified opinion on 2021 accounts: Bloomberg Tax (1 March 2023), Reuters via Yahoo Finance (2023), Irish Times (30 March 2023). Bank of Lithuania fine: Baltic Times, LRT and Irish Times (8 April 2025; the latter also covers the Starling Bank comparison).
