Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan boss whose performance record and plain-speaking longevity have made him Wall Street’s undisputed elder statesman, is not one to dish out compliments willy-nilly – especially if they’re in praise of thriving competitors.
So it was notable when he humble-bragged in his April letter to shareholders that “being a company of sizeable magnitude makes it easier to ignore new competitors since they often start small in one product but move rapidly to expand”.
Among the handful of rival upstarts he went on to praise by name was Revolut, a $75bn-valued fintech that has rapidly outgrown the scale of potential acquisitions even Dimon’s bank (with a valuation more than 10 times the size) would contemplate.
Unless it is scooped up by someone else, Revolut appears on track for a $200bn stock market listing in 2028.
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So far, the UK-headquartered bank has rolled out its app-based services to 40 countries (with plans to be in 30 more by 2030).
Much of the attention paid to Revolut over recent years has focused on the painfully long banking licence approvals process it underwent in its home market (much to the delight of Britain’s incumbent banks). But across the Irish Sea, a case study success story has unfolded that illustrates just how vulnerable old-school banks can be to dynamic fintechs.
Worldwide, Revolut now claims a total of 75 million customers, with significant operations from Britain (notwithstanding the banking licence delay) and the whole of the EU to Mexico. But it is in Ireland that Revolut has had the greatest success in seizing market share from rivals old and new. Here it has 3.4 million customers, more than 80 per cent of the country’s adult population.
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Although, for the time being, many of those customers also have accounts with one of the Big Three incumbents (Bank of Ireland, AIB or Permanent TSB), it is easy to project a swift and steady erosion of those banks’ market share. As elsewhere, the initial bias towards payments and basic banking will swiftly broaden into lending and other products.
So embedded has the start-up bank become in Ireland that it is now common parlance for someone who owes you money to say they will Revolut you – ie, transfer money from their bank account to yours via your phone.
[ Revolut to refund thousands of Irish customers after ATM charge errorOpens in new window ]
There are two big reasons for the phenomenon. First, the landscape was ripe for disruption. Ireland’s three main incumbent banks had been laid low by the repercussions of the 2008 financial meltdown and the euro zone crisis that followed.
Under the terms of the country’s bailout by the EU and IMF, the banks’ operations were restricted: strict limits were imposed on banker pay, limiting their ability to recruit the best people; and it was difficult to invest in technological modernisation, just at the time when customer demand for mobile banking was booming.
Symptomatic of the malaise is the fact that the kind of instant payments technology that has long existed in other countries – and which Revolut pioneered in Ireland – was launched by Ireland’s big banks, under the Zippay brand, only three months ago.
The other reason for Revolut’s success – in Ireland and elsewhere – lies in its own drive and ambition. The pace and opportunism displayed by the group in its global build-out has been particularly striking when compared with legacy banks.
Big global groups such as HSBC and Citigroup have spent recent years retreating from far-flung international retail banking operations, blaming the high cost of maintaining a branch network and an inability to exploit economies of scale when each market is used to very different products.
Revolut has gone in the opposite direction, its new “tech-stack” proving far more suitable for international scaling than the often outdated systems of legacy rivals. Sometimes its rate of expansion has surpassed the ability of its own systems to cope with, for example, anti-fraud safeguards, at least to the satisfaction of regulators.
Sometimes it has been hampered by geopolitics: Brexit scuppered an original hope to operate as a bank in Britain under a Lithuania-granted EU banking licence.
But Revolut has always seemed to find a way. The next big test will be the US. When the group applied for a national banking charter there a few months ago, chief executive Nik Storonsky described it as “a key pillar of our global growth strategy” en route to a target of getting 100 million customers. It’s a fair bet that Dimon will be watching closely. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
