Nik Storonsky says Revolut will be a bank with "effectively zero risk."
He started his career trading derivatives at Lehman Brothers.
Storonsky told the FT today that Revolut will cap lending at 10-20% of deposits. It will sell the loans it does make, whole or through securitizations, what some call an "asset-light model"
Revolut lends about 6% of its deposit funding base. A typical bank lends out closer to 100%.
At the end of 2025, Revolut held GBP 50.2bn of customer balances and a GBP 2.2bn loan book. It kept 90% of its assets in cash and treasuries.
---
This is a fundamentally different business model from traditional banks where the goal was "net interest margin." Take deposits, lend them out, and earn the spread. Profit depends on the current interest rate, and every new loan needs more capital.
Revolut uses the license to hold your salary and savings. It earns from cards, FX, wealth and subscriptions.
Storonsky puts Return on Equity (ROE) at 40-50% after stripping out excess capital. That is about double the best banks, and higher than Nubank.
And you can see this in how investors are reacting. They valued Revolut at $115bn in July, around 68x 2025 net profit of $1.7bn. Barclays was worth about $95bn the same week on $12.9bn of net profit.
---
"Zero risk" here means credit risk.
Three risks stay with Revolut:
1. Rate cuts shrink interest income, which was GBP 974m in 2025 (22% of revenue).
2. Loan sales need private credit and securitization buyers to keep buying.
3. Fraud, AML and outages become the main ways Revolut can lose money or a license.
Northern Rock failed in 2007 when the securitization market shut, because it funded itself there. Revolut funds itself with deposits. A shut market would stop its lending growth and leave its funding intact.
---
If you hold a license or want one, decide what you want it for.
Fee income grows without tying up capital, and investors pay tech multiples for it.
Private credit funds want consumer loans and have no customers to lend to. Revolut has 80M. It can originate the loans, sell them to the funds and keep the fees.
What makes this so interesting to me is HOW different it is from Nubank.
Nubank is THE subprime lender in Brazil. It made that wildly profitable. It is a bank that lends.
Revolut is in Europe, where interest rates are far worse, credit spreads are tighter, and it builds an entirely different machine.
h/t
@maxkarpis for the story find