Revolut — What I Think
Revolut’s original insight was tiny and exactly right: the spread is theft, and everyone knew it but nobody had made it visible.
If you’ve ever changed money at a bank or an airport, and as someone with an Indian passport chasing residency and a CBI plan, I do this constantly, you know the scam. The “no fee” exchange that quietly bakes a fat margin into the rate. Revolut led with the interbank rate and near-zero markup on a card you could use anywhere. That was it. That was the wedge. It targeted the specific, furious customer I am: the traveller, the expat, the cross-border worker who feels robbed every time they cross a border. Find the universally-resented invisible fee and make it zero, in public. Brilliant.
But the deeper Revolut thesis, the under-appreciated one, is velocity as strategy. Nik Storonsky runs the company like a trading desk. Ship insanely fast, attach every adjacent financial product, crypto, stocks, savings, insurance, business accounts, eSIMs, and see what sticks. Most fintechs pick a vertical and go deep. Revolut went wide on purpose, betting that a young, mobile, borderless generation wants one app for all of money and will tolerate rough edges for breadth and price. It’s the Western super-app attempt, built not on a chat app like in Asia but on the FX-pain wedge. Whether the super-app shape survives outside China is one of the great open questions in fintech, and Revolut is the most serious bet on “yes.”
Where it’s exposed: a company that moves that fast, into that many regulated products, in that many countries, is in a permanent race between growth and the compliance/licensing reality that catches every fintech eventually. Banking is the business where the boring stuff, risk, fraud, regulatory trust, a full license in every market, is the actual product, and you cannot ship your way around it the way you ship features. The thing that makes Revolut great (speed) is the thing that makes it fragile (banking does not reward speed at the foundation). I worked next to those rails at Visa. The settlement layer does not care how fast your front end iterates.
Still, directionally they’re aimed at the right future. Money should be borderless, multi-currency, and live in one app for a generation that doesn’t think in nationalities. That’s my generation. They saw us early.
Favorite & worst CEO
- On its leadership: Nik Storonsky, co-founder and CEO. I connect with the operating philosophy more than almost anyone on this list, relentless speed, an ex-trader’s instinct to attack the most resented hidden fee (FX spread), and the nerve to bet on a Western super-app when consensus said it couldn’t exist outside Asia. It’s the closest thing to how I’d run something. The hardest test of his vision is exactly where his strength becomes a liability: you cannot iterate your way through banking licenses, fraud, and regulatory trust, and an intense growth culture eventually meets a foundation that only rewards patience. Right about the borderless-money future. The question is whether speed-as-religion survives contact with the boring parts of being a bank.
Part of “What I Think About the Top 50 Fintech Companies of All Time.” I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.