Revolut Unbound

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Ten years ago, I was meeting with a prominent angel investor when he beckoned me round the table to see what he’d pulled up on his laptop. He was excited about his latest investment – a company barely a year old, launched to tackle a pain point familiar to travellers the world over: “spending and sending money abroad sucks”. On the screen was an internal company dashboard and, as we watched, customer engagement metrics were ticking up. He described the product and explained how his daughter was using it on a trip to Spain that week – a card, linked to an app, that allowed her to spend in euros without incurring foreign exchange fees. The dashboard suggested that many were doing the same.An experienced investor, he’d done his due diligence. Among his calls was one to a senior executive of Visa. The company would never be able to maintain a competitive advantage, the exec told him. The big players would copy whatever it built. Encouraged by his own experience of the product – and his daughter’s – he ignored the advice and wrote a cheque in the company’s seed round, becoming a 3.3% shareholder.Today, Revolut does much more than free currency exchange. Its product range spans savings, lending, investing and trading, business banking, eSIMs, travel booking and more. It has 70 million customers across 39 countries – up from around 150,000 at the time of that meeting, when it operated in the UK alone. Full-year results released this week show gross revenue of $6.0 billion and net income of $1.7 billion – numbers its founder and CEO Nik Storonsky reckons will grow by at least 50% t…