This felt very engineered, with the Revolut hack news and all (#1573563). Distracting from the hack by flushing the radiowaves with abundant news of IPOs and CEO interview quotes... Literally drowning it out.

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 co-founded Revolut 12 years ago and remains its hard-charging chief executive, likes the theatrics of holding court in such a setting.

Revolut, far and away Europe’s most successful start-up, is now valued at $115bn. And he himself is worth $33bn.

That's kind of a sad reflection on Europooreans and their (our??) failing economies. Klarna and Spotify are some other global brands to have come out of Europe (though, really the fintech wonder of Sweden/Finland, #1572208 but fuck you), all of which are orders of magnitude less valuable, less impactful, less revolutionary than the American tech wonders — from Uber to Tesla to Anthropic to Nvidia to Netflix etc etc

Quite some business progress, even in the land of the hallowed free:

has been an upbeat few months in Revolut’s rollercoaster pre-teen years. In March, after a five-year wait, the group — now with 80mn 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

"What can Europe learn from the bank’s rise? “Almost anything is possible,” says Storonsky, without missing a beat"

lol, says the top dog of THE ONLY company to have made it, properly speaking ...like LeBron or Tom Brady go, "what I love about my sport is that anyone can make it to the top!"

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. But on the plus side, there is a “very good quality of talent . . . which is actually much cheaper compared to . . . the US, especially California”.

Yes, we know. It's sort of in the word "Europoorean." #1560586 #1020250

His background was quite interesting: Ukrainian-born parents, exceptionally well educated etc. Also, if you work hard at investment banks you can have enough to start a global fintech:

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

This is initially how most people, Den included, got into using them — as a bridge to fix a money problem. Then, with more features and better tech, increasingly as the first-stop money and travel shop. (Once they open their Swedish office later this year, complete with integrated IBANs and Swish, I'll cancel my accounts at a Swedish high street bank; no point anymore.)

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.”

100% correct and a very important observation in business generally; old, merged patchwork are sometimes overtaken by clean slates. Just throw out the old shit and start over.

Amazing, yeah:

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 $3mn ransom.

"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."

A Riskless Bank?

I mean, not really... but it's not doing the general deposit-to-loans money-printing recycling stuff: #1463559

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”.

My archive isn't working anymore: https://archive.ph/newest/https://www.ft.com/content/df52a49a-ab6a-4997-a609-169e830a26fa