(Bloomberg) -- Revolut boss Nik Storonsky has hinted at making a fresh bid for a US banking license as part of the payment firm’s evolution from foreign exchange startup to global finance firm.
Stornosky told an audience of investors in Helsinki on Wednesday the US market was more credit card-driven and it’s hard to compete without that option, and its ability to earn interchange fees. “In the US, you need to be credit driven. So in the US, we need to have a banking license to launch a product,” he said.
Revolut operates in the US via its partner Lead Bank, having parked an application in 2021 for a license that would allow it to offer its own loans and other banking services.
Still, Storonsky, who co-founded Revolut in 2015, is in no rush to conquer new markets like before, saying the firm’s initial grow fast, break things philosophy in international expansion had been a mistake.
“For a long time I wanted to be as less regulated as possible, it was the completely wrong decision,” he said. A smaller company would have found it easier to gain licenses than a firm the size of Revolut today, he added.
Relying on lighter permissions such as e-money licenses in new markets can be quicker, Storonsky said, but “then your product becomes much less comprehensive compared to banking product, and as a result, there is not that much product market fit. So we had to redo the whole expansion later.”
The digital finance giant received its UK bank license in July, three years after it first submitted its application. Revolut was recently valued at $45 billion in a secondary share sale and this week, the firm announced it had hit 50 million customers globally, with 10 million in the UK.
Storonsky wants to double in size, and said the firm was targeting 100 million daily active customers in 100 countries, with $100 billion in revenue a year. “We want Revolut to be number one global bank,” he said.
--With assistance from Yazhou Sun.
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