Revolut built its European scale through a simple product, international relevance and customer recommendations. Its next challenge is to turn that scale into a broader and more locally embedded business while continuing to expand its customer base, product range and geographic reach.
Kuba Fast, the newly appointed CEO of Revolut Bank Europe, and Wiktor Stopa, Revolut’s Head of Growth for Central and Eastern Europe and Western Europe, made their first official public appearance in the region during the Formula 1 Hungarian Grand Prix weekend.
At the press event, held in the Audi Revolut F1 Team Motorhome, they described a growth model based on a centrally developed product, deeper local banking infrastructure and a disciplined willingness to test new ideas.
Fast said Revolut now has approximately 58 million customers in the European Union and is adding one million customers globally every 17 days. Despite that scale, he said the company still sees itself near the beginning of its development.
“For me, we are at step three out of ten. We think there is easily room for maybe 100 or 150 million customers for Revolut in Europe” – Fast said.
Growth is becoming multiplicative
For Stopa, Revolut’s most important acquisition channel remains the product itself. Marketing investment is increasing, but customer recommendations continue to demonstrate the strength of the proposition and extend Revolut’s reach beyond directly acquired users.
“The core product is what helps attract people. People think it is simple, easy to use and easy to understand for an 18-year-old as much as for a 60-year-old,” he said.
Fast described Revolut’s expansion as simultaneous progress across customers, countries and products. Based on 2025 figures, the company had 11 individual products each contributing more than £100 million to its profit and loss account.
The larger the customer base becomes, the more valuable each new product can be; at the same time, every new customer can adopt an expanding range of services. “As countries grow, as customers grow, every new thing we put in place starts having a multiplier effect. Mathematically, it really is an exponential growth pattern” – Fast said.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the company had reached a valuation of $115 billion, up from $75 billion approximately eight months earlier. Revolut could not confirm the latest figure, but argued that higher valuations reflect increasingly credible execution across geographic expansion, product development and profitability.
From users to deeper banking relationships
Fast described primary banking customers as particularly valuable, although he stressed that Revolut is willing to serve users with different levels of engagement. Its cost structure allows it to support both occasional customers and those who rely on it for most of their financial activity.
He called the primary customer the “gold medal”: such users adopt more services, remain longer and are more likely to recommend Revolut. However, traditional banking relationships are sticky, and trust develops over time.
Stopa approached the same issue from a branding perspective. As market penetration grows, communicating only Revolut’s original foreign-exchange proposition becomes less effective. In Ireland, the company has increasingly used the “Revolut Bank” identity to emphasise the breadth and seriousness of its offering.
“Calling ourselves a bank makes people think that we are serious not only because of our customer numbers. It tells them something they may already know, but that we need to tell them again” – Stopa said.
The word “bank” can also be restrictive, he added, because Revolut increasingly operates beyond traditional financial services. Nevertheless, it can help strengthen trust and change customer perceptions in more mature markets.
Central technology, local integration
Both executives emphasised that Revolut’s centrally developed platform must be supported by deeper local integration. Domestic payment systems, local branches and participation in national financial ecosystems all matter if the company wants to become part of customers’ everyday financial lives.
Stopa said the central model also allows Revolut to transfer experience rapidly between countries. “We can gather learnings from Germany and pass them to Hungary, or from Hungary and pass them to Romania.”
The model is not based on offering an identical banking experience everywhere. Revolut maintains a common technological core while adapting to local regulation, customer expectations and competitive conditions.
Hungary is one of Revolut’s ten largest markets, according to Fast. Approximately one in four Hungarian adults has a Revolut account, while around 80 percent of transactions made by Hungarian customers are domestic. Since opening its Hungarian branch, Revolut has doubled its local workforce, introduced a promotional 4.25 per cent rate for instant-access savings and taken steps towards joining the Hungarian Banking Association.
Stopa argued that the current level of penetration should not be seen as a ceiling. He pointed to Ireland, where adoption has reached a much larger share of the adult population. “If this happens in a smaller environment, there is no reason why it wouldn’t happen in any larger environment,” he said.
A test-and-scale growth model
Revolut’s willingness to test and abandon ideas is another central part of its strategy. Fast described the company as “data-driven and dispassionate”. Through its “New Bets” framework, Revolut gives focused resources to new ideas and then expands, adjusts or discontinues them according to performance.
One experiment involves physical presence without building a conventional branch network. The company is testing branded ATMs and airport card-vending machines, using high-footfall locations to gather meaningful data quickly.
“If it works, if it meets the objective, we will go at it with energy and vigour. If it doesn’t, we will tweak it."
Stopa said Revolut originally expected airport vending machines mainly to attract new customers. The data showed that many existing users were also collecting physical cards after previously relying on mobile wallets, helping the concept expand across European airports.
The same approach applies beyond banking. Stopa highlighted eSIMs and mobile connectivity as examples of services developed around customer needs, tested in one market and rolled out more widely if adoption supports the investment.
“There is the banking world, and there is the beyond-banking world. There is a lot of innovation happening in both.”
From fintech to European champion
Fast argued that Revolut should increasingly be viewed as a European champion rather than just a successful fintech. He credited the European single market with helping the company scale and predicted that major retail banks would eventually adopt many elements of Revolut’s model: digital distribution, continuous product development and a broad range of services delivered through one platform.
The company still has to turn rapid acquisition into durable engagement, manage growing regulatory complexity and expand without weakening the simplicity that attracted customers in the first place.
Its strategy, however, is clear: combine a common European platform with increasingly local products, infrastructure and positioning, then use data to decide what should be expanded and what should be left behind.
(Cover: Revolut)
