EXCLUSIVE: "Access All Areas" - Francesca Carlesi, Revolut in 'The Fintech Magazine

Five years after first applying, Revolut is finally a fully fledged UK bank. Its UK CEO discusses why the next chapter is about becoming indispensable to customers, including a new target – the entrepreneurial nouveau riche

When the Prudential Regulation Authority lifted the last restrictions on Revolut’s UK banking licence in March 2026, it ended one of the longest running sagas in British fintech.

The company applied in January 2021, received a restricted licence in July 2024, then spent a further 20 months in ‘mobilisation’, a phase most new banks clear in 12. The protracted timeline reflected Revolut’s scale. Now valued at $75billion, with 14 million UK customers and more than 80 million worldwide. It wasn’t a case of just building a bank, but represented the transition of a globally significant institution into a new regulatory framework.

For Revolut UK CEO Francesca Carlesi, the milestone was pivotal, both personally and professionally. Appointed in November 2023 after senior roles at Deutsche Bank, Barclays and McKinsey, and having co-founded and run Molo, the UK’s first fully digital mortgage lender, she arrived declaring Revolut ‘the future of digital banking’.

“Receiving the banking licence was a watershed moment for all of us, and my personal highlight,” she says. “I’ve been in banking all my life, one way or another, and it doesn’t happen often that you go through the journey of building a bank from scratch. It’s a really big milestone for the whole company; not only for the UK, but for Revolut globally.”

Founder Nik Storonsky had become increasingly frustrated with UK regulators, publicly branding them ‘extremely bureaucratic’ and musing about listing the most valuable European fintech startup on Nasdaq rather than the London Stock Exchange – which eportedly prompted the UK Business Secretary to seek an urgent meeting.

Carlesi’s arrival marked a change of register – less megaphone, more methodical engagement. She is diplomatically silent on the frustrations of those years, preferring to talk about what the outcome signals.

“The UK is our home country. It’s where Revolut was born, and it’s still our single largest market globally,” she says. “Until we had the banking licence, we couldn’t launch a lot of the products you can only offer if you’re a bank.

“The UK regulators represent the global standard for regulation. The fact that we are a bank in our home country, and our home regulators are supporting this development, unlocks global growth.” Days before the UK approval, Revolut filed for a US banking charter, and received conditional authorisation in September 2026.

From travel card to ‘top of wallet’

The prize is in plain sight. Revolut has spent a decade as ‘the app people love for holidays and foreign exchange’. Revolut now wants to mature into ‘the only bank you’ll ever need’. FSCS-protected current accounts are rolling out, with lending to follow. The question underneath, though, is one every neobank faces: how many customers actually use it as their main account? Revolut has 14 million UK customers (80 million globally) and for most of those users it likely remains a travel tool rather than the account their salary lands in.

Fintech commentator Chris Skinner, in a broadly admiring essay on the company last month, put it succinctly: many users view Revolut as a secondary account, and the challenge is to convert them into customers who trust it with their salaries, pensions and long-term financial lives.

Carlesi’s response to that is to focus on making Revolut top of wallet.

“We look a lot at this concept of ‘top of wallet’: how many transactions, how many activities, how many products people engage with at Revolut. We have a lot of metrics at Revolut, because we are very data-driven, but you have to distinguish the forest from the trees,” she says. “What I’m really looking at is customer engagement throughout the life cycle of any financial transaction.
“This is not the banking of the ’80s. What matters is being top of mind whenever people do any financial activity. When you buy something, you pay with a Revolut card. When you travel, it’s a Revolut card. If you need a loan, you come to Revolut. Being top of wallet means being front and centre, embedded in customers’ financial lives.”

Wealth first, mortgages later

If engagement is the metric, the wealthy are now the target. In May, Revolut’s trading arm secured a Variation of Permission from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), allowing it to offer advisory and managed portfolio services alongside execution-only investing.

Victoria Laffey, Head of Operations at Revolut Trading, called the permissions ‘the missing piece’, uniting investment, advisory and portfolio management under one roof. Today, high net worth status in the app is essentially a self-certification tick-box (£100,000 of annual income or £250,000 in net assets) unlocking products such as crypto Exchange-Traded Notes.

The ambition, as The Banker and others have reported, is far grander: a full private banking service, expected later this year, for clients with upwards of £500,000, at a moment when incumbents such as Coutts are raising their thresholds into the millions. Carlesi frames the move as classic Revolut opportunism: finding the underserved segment and going after it.

“We spotted some time ago that there is a very big potential market of wealthy individuals who are completely underserved by the current banking system,” she says. “Legacy banks have been gradually raising the bar on what they classify as private clients. So today there’s a big segment of customers who are really wealthy, maybe from entrepreneurial wealth, and they don’t find the right services because they are below the thresholds of the big banks.

“That’s where we want to go: professional wealth management for high net worth individuals, but done in the Revolut way.”

Notably absent from the short-term roadmap is the product Carlesi knows best. Before Revolut, she co-founded and ran the digital mortgage lender Molo. But Revolut’s immediate future isn’t in the mortgage market.

“I have a little bit of a bias for mortgages, but this is not coming soon in the UK – it’s not on our roadmap,” she says. “It’s a basic, very important financial need, but we have a lot of other things to do, so we need to prioritise. We will definitely launch into simple lending, credit cards and personal loans, but mortgages will be further away.”

Trust and technology

On the topic of AI, Revolut’s focus is not on chatbots but on controls. That is no accident. Revolut’s growth has been shadowed by regulatory friction on the continent, including fines from the Bank of Lithuania, its EU home supervisor, and in April penalties totalling more than €11.5million from Italy’s competition authority, in part over how it communicated with customers whose accounts had been suspended or restricted. Revolut was appealing the decision this summer, and a spokesperson at the time said the company remained ‘confident that our communications are clear and transparent’ and that account reviews existed to protect customers.

Despite these bumps in the road, the direction of travel is clear: as Revolut becomes a bank everywhere, it will be supervised like one everywhere.

“Being a bank is all about getting customers to trust you, and trust is about controls, capital and governance,” says Carlesi. “The line between being a bank and being a technology company is blurred. The successful banks of the future will maintain the discipline of banking controls while being powered by leading-edge technology.

“We’re moving from a world where the question was ‘is technology lowering your controls?’ to one where technology is a key enabler, a necessity. There is no way any more you can give customers the safety they deserve using manual controls and periodic reviews. Think of AI-driven fraud detection, sanctions screening and onboarding.”

Fraud, the UK’s most prevalent crime against individuals, is the proving ground, and Carlesi offers a striking statistic: “Out of our 10,000-person workforce, roughly a third is working in financial crime, compliance and controls. That’s quite a big chunk for a company that was born as a technology company.”

The approach, she says, is precision rather than blanket caution.
“Instead of blocking everybody, no matter what, we detect very accurately, based on behavioural data, when a fraud is happening. We give specific alerts and create specific friction there. Where there is no reason to believe there is fraud, we give the best experience we can.”

The decade ahead

Skinner’s essay ends with a prediction that Revolut will be ‘Android for finance’ by 2036: 300 million customers, a trillion-dollar valuation, invisible and everywhere. It’s a claim that even admirers might think a little over-zealous. But his diagnosis of how the company might get there rings true – it innovates less like a bank and more like a venture capital firm, funding dozens of internal startup bets, scaling the winners and quietly killing the rest.

A company that began as a cheap travel card is now a licensed bank in its home market, with a regulator-approved runway into lending and a credible claim on the wealthy clients that incumbents are quietly abandoning. The intent is unmistakable: to prove that the fastest-moving company in European finance can also be one of the most controlled.

“Innovation and trust are not opposites any more,” Carlesi says. “They are massively complementary.”