Revolut Offers £25,000 Loans to Storm Britain's Banks

By Daniel Rao

Photo: Canary Wharf, London, where HSBC and other high-street banks are headquartered. This is a file photo of London's banking district, not a Revolut office or product. Credit: Gordon Joly, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

For eleven years, Britain's biggest banks have watched Revolut eat their lunch one airport lounge at a time — the holiday spending, the Friday-night splits, the cheap currency exchange before a flight to Malaga. Now it wants the main course. Revolut has begun offering unsecured personal loans in Britain, its UK chief executive Francesca Carlesi told Reuters on 26 October, and with that single product the company stops being a clever app that sits alongside your bank and starts being a bank that intends to replace it.

This is the moment the high street has been dreading since 2015, and the timing is not an accident. Revolut only secured its full UK banking licence in March 2026, after a five-year regulatory obstacle course. Loans are the first real product that licence unlocks, a credit card is coming next, and mortgages are openly on the agenda. Europe's most valuable startup, privately valued at $115 billion — more than listed Barclays or NatWest are worth on the stock market — is finally coming for the most lucrative turf in British retail banking: lending ordinary people money at a margin.

Whether it can actually do it is a different question, and a much more interesting one. Revolut has more than 80 million customers worldwide and 14 million in Britain, yet it still makes far less money from each of them than a traditional bank does. The loan book will test whether a company built on slick design and cheap foreign exchange can do the unglamorous, unforgiving work of judging who will pay money back — and whether customers who trust it with their holiday money will trust it with their salary.

What borrowers actually get

The product itself is deliberately unremarkable, and that is the point. Revolut's unsecured personal loans run from £2,000 to £25,000, repayable over one to five years, with annual percentage rates of 6.9% to 29.3%, according to a company spokesperson quoted by Reuters. Funds land within minutes of approval. There is no fee for repaying early.

"UK consumers can face unnecessary friction and complex fee structures when borrowing," Carlesi said in the company's launch statement. "We've built a transparent and simple loan process with near-instant funds on approval, no fee for early repayment and competitive rates. Plus, by bringing credit into the Revolut ecosystem, customers can see exactly how their repayments fit alongside their day-to-day budgeting, spending and investing all in one place."

Read that statement twice and the strategy is sitting in plain sight. Revolut is not competing on price alone — a 29.3% top rate is nobody's idea of cheap, and the best rates will go to the borrowers every bank wants anyway. It is competing on convenience: the loan lives in the same app as the spending, the budgeting and the investing, so borrowing feels less like a trip to the bank and more like another feature. For a generation that does its banking on a phone while waiting for a train, that integration is the whole pitch.

The rollout, for now, is small. Loans are available only to a selected group of customers, expanding to Revolut's 14 million UK customers over the coming months, Carlesi told Reuters. The company has set no target for how large its British loan book should become. Caution, in this case, is not modesty. It is the only sane way to start a lending business.

The cautious rollout — and the securitisation escape hatch

Unsecured lending is where fintech optimism goes to be stress-tested. There is no house to repossess and no car to recover; if the borrower stops paying, the lender simply loses. Traditional banks have spent decades accumulating the spending and repayment histories that let them price that risk. Revolut, by its own admission, does not have that depth of data in Britain.

Carlesi told Reuters the company has supplemented its underwriting with information purchased from external providers, and said it was confident about its credit analysis. That confidence will be tested in a difficult economy. Reuters noted that Revolut's lending push comes amid persistent cost-of-living pressures in Britain, worsened by a soft labour market and rising inflation — precisely the conditions that make borrowers less able to repay.

We compared the loan terms across the launch coverage in Reuters, City AM and PYMNTS, and all three agree on the figures: £2,000 to £25,000, one to five years, 6.9% to 29.3% APR, near-instant funding, no early repayment fee. The consistency matters, because launch-day numbers in fintech have a habit of drifting between announcement and availability.

Then there is the escape hatch. Carlesi told Reuters that Revolut eventually plans to offload much of its lending risk through securitisation — packaging loans and selling them on — aiming to keep its loan-to-deposit ratio close to 6%, far lower than other banks. In other words, Revolut does not necessarily want to be a lender in the old sense at all. It wants to be the shopfront that originates the loan, takes a cut, and passes most of the risk to somebody else. If that works, it is a neat trick. If the securitisation market sours, or if early arrears run hotter than the models predict, the company will discover what every lender eventually discovers: there is no clever structure that substitutes for good underwriting.

Why now, and why Britain

The licence is the story behind the story. Revolut first applied for a UK banking licence in 2021. It received a restricted version in July 2024, under which its UK banking arm could hold no more than £50,000 in total customer deposits — a rounding error for a company of its size — while regulators tested its systems. Only in March 2026 did the Bank of England's Prudential Regulation Authority lift those restrictions, allowing Revolut Bank UK to operate as a fully licensed bank, take deposits onto its own balance sheet, and offer FSCS-protected accounts.

Co-founder and chief executive Nik Storonsky did not hide his frustration during the wait. The Times reported that he called Britain's regulator "extremely bureaucratic" and said it was "hard to do business in the UK" as a result. When the full licence finally arrived, his tone changed completely. "Launching our UK bank has been a long-term strategic priority for Revolut and marks a significant moment in our journey," he said. "The UK is our home market and central to our growth."

Britain matters disproportionately because it is where Revolut is biggest: 14 million customers, its largest single market, and the place where its brand is strongest. It also matters because the incumbents are, by fintech standards, beatable on experience even if they are unbeatable on scale. NatWest, Lloyds, Barclays, Santander's UK business and HSBC — the five names Reuters lists as Revolut's new rivals — all run loan applications that still feel, to many customers, like applying for planning permission. Revolut's bet is that a five-minute, in-app process with transparent terms will peel off exactly the borrowers those banks take for granted.

The ambition does not stop at loans. Carlesi told Reuters that a credit card product will launch in the near future, and that Revolut eventually plans to enter Britain's fiercely competitive mortgage market, where Lloyds alone holds roughly a fifth of the market. Mortgages are a different order of difficulty — bigger tickets, longer terms, vastly more regulation — but the direction of travel is unmistakable. Revolut is building, piece by piece, the full suite of a high-street bank, without the high street.

The two doubts that will not go away

For all the momentum, Reuters put its finger on the two questions that hang over this launch, and neither has a satisfying answer yet. The first is per-customer revenue: Revolut earns far less from each customer than a traditional bank, because most of its users treat it as a second account — for travel, for splitting bills, for the odd bit of investing — while their salary lands somewhere else. Loans and credit cards are designed to fix exactly that, by giving customers a reason to keep real money inside Revolut. But the fix assumes the very behaviour change it is supposed to produce.

The second doubt is the proportion of customers using Revolut as their primary account and paying their salaries in. Until that number moves decisively, Revolut remains, in the eyes of its critics, a brilliant secondary product with a primary-bank valuation. The $115 billion figure — set in a secondary share sale this year, up from $45 billion in 2024, according to Reuters — prices in a future in which Revolut becomes most customers' main bank. The loan launch is a bet that this future is now arriving. It is not proof that it has.

Then there is the scrutiny that comes with scale. In April 2025, the Bank of Lithuania fined Revolut Bank €3.5 million — a record for the country — over shortcomings in transaction-monitoring controls, after finding the bank had not always correctly identified suspicious transactions. Reuters noted that the company said the investigation found no confirmed instances of money laundering and that it had strengthened its systems. In September 2026, Reuters reported, Revolut accidentally sent customer data to hackers posing as government investigators, though the company said its systems and customer funds were unaffected. And earlier this month, Revolut was among the financial firms caught in the hours-long Google Cloud outage that knocked out bank cards, courts and NHS services across London. None of these episodes, on its own, derails a lending business. Together, they are a reminder that the gap between moving fast and breaking things narrows sharply once you hold other people's deposits.

Carlesi announced the launch on LinkedIn with a Union Jack emoji and a line that captured the company's mood: "Launching lending in the UK!" It was, by the standards of banking announcements, almost jaunty. She has earned the jauntiness — getting a full UK licence out of a regulator that spent years examining this company was a genuine achievement. But lending has a way of humbling jaunty announcements. The first arrears figures, whenever they emerge, will tell us more about this product than any launch post.

What this means for the high street

It is tempting to frame this as a death match — nimble fintech versus lumbering incumbents — but that framing flatters both sides. The incumbents are not standing still: Barclays is cutting 5,000 jobs, including the developers building its AI systems, as it tries to slim down and automate, and American Express has axed 3,850 jobs to prepare for AI in a record quarter. The old banks know the threat is real, and they are restructuring — sometimes brutally — to meet it.

What Revolut really threatens is not the existence of the high-street banks but their economics. Personal loans are high-margin, and the most profitable borrowers — creditworthy, digitally comfortable, allergic to branch queues — are exactly the customers Revolut already owns. If even a fraction of its 14 million UK users borrow through the app, and then keep their salaries there because their loan lives there, the flywheel starts to turn. Each new product makes the next one easier to sell, and the primary-account problem starts solving itself.

The global picture reinforces the point. Revolut received preliminary approval for a national banking licence in the United States in September 2026, after winning licences in Britain and France earlier in the year, Reuters reported, and Storonsky has said that if the company lists its shares, it would favour a primary listing in the US. Speaking in Turin in October, he sketched the scale of the data advantage he believes underpins all of this: "With 30 to 40 million transactions taking place every day on Revolut, we have a unique dataset to build on." That dataset is now being pointed at credit decisions. Whether it proves as good at predicting defaults as it has been at predicting what travellers want to buy abroad is the £25,000 question — quite literally.

Our read: the banks should be worried, but not yet terrified

Here is where we plant our flag. Revolut's loan launch is genuinely significant — the first product of its hard-won banking licence, aimed squarely at the incumbents' profit pool, from a company with the customers, the capital and the distribution to matter. Dismissing it as another fintech press release would be a mistake, and the high-street banks, to their credit, do not appear to be making it.

But significance is not the same as success, and the history of fintech lending is littered with companies that confused a beautiful application form with a sound loan book. Revolut's cautious rollout, its bought-in credit data, its plan to securitise most of the risk — these are the moves of a company that knows exactly how much it does not know about lending. That humility is encouraging. What it cannot do is substitute for the evidence, which will arrive slowly, in arrears rates and default curves, over the next two or three years.

The real test is not whether Revolut can lend £25,000 to a few thousand selected customers. It is whether, in three years' time, a meaningful share of its 14 million UK customers treats it as their bank — the place the salary lands, the mortgage sits, the rainy-day savings live — rather than the app they open at the airport. If that happens, Britain's banking landscape will have genuinely changed, and the $115 billion valuation will look prescient. If it does not, Revolut will remain what it has always been, only bigger: the best second account in Britain, now with loans attached.

Either way, the high street's quietest decade is over. The spending app has grown teeth. Now we find out whether it can chew.

Revolut loans FAQ: the questions borrowers are asking

What loans does Revolut offer in the UK?

Unsecured personal loans from £2,000 to £25,000, repayable over one to five years, at 6.9% to 29.3% APR, with funds in minutes of approval and no fee for early repayment.

Who can get one right now?

Only a selected group of customers at launch, expanding to Revolut's 14 million UK customers over the coming months. The company has set no target for how large its British loan book should become.

Why is Revolut lending now?

Its full UK banking licence arrived in March 2026 after a five-year process — a restricted licence in July 2024 capped total customer deposits at £50,000 — and loans are the first real product that licence unlocks, with a credit card next and mortgages openly on the agenda.

What is the securitisation plan?

Revolut eventually plans to offload much of its lending risk by packaging loans and selling them on, aiming to keep its loan-to-deposit ratio close to 6% — it wants to originate loans and pass most of the risk to somebody else.

What happens next?

The credit-card launch, the first arrears and default signals on the loan book, and progress on the US national banking licence, for which Revolut received preliminary approval in September 2026.

Sources: Reuters, "Revolut launches personal loans in UK, taking on major banks," 26 October 2026 (Lawrence White and Tommy Reggiori Wilkes); Reuters, Turin, 9 October 2026 (Elvira Pollina); PYMNTS, "Revolut Expands UK Banking Business With Personal Loans," 26 October 2026; City AM / Business Live, 26 October 2026; Bank of Lithuania / Delano reporting on the April 2025 €3.5 million fine; Alliance News / Perspective Media on the March 2026 full UK banking licence; TechPulse USA's earlier coverage, linked above.

Daniel Rao covers fintech, AI and technology policy for TechPulse USA.