Nik Storonsky has a number he likes: 6 per cent. That’s Revolut’s loan-to-deposit ratio, against roughly 100 per cent for a conventional bank, and in the Patrick Jenkins Interview in the Financial Times published this week, Revolut’s founder and chief executive explains why he intends to keep it that way. “We don’t plan to have exposure of more than 10-20 per cent,” he says. Loans Revolut does write are sold on whole or securitised. The design, he says, gives the business “effectively zero risk.”
Revolut’s own 2025 annual report backs the headline number independently: a 6.2 per cent loan-to-deposit ratio against £50.2bn of customer balances, with fee income (cards, subscriptions, wealth, FX) making up 76 per cent of revenue against 21.6 per cent from interest. Storonsky built that model out of Europe: the group’s original pan-EU banking licence has run from Lithuania for nearly a decade.
Storonsky puts the return on that structure at 40 to 50 per cent, “once excess capital is deducted,” double his best-performing rivals on his account.
Standard return on equity divides net income by average shareholders’ equity, full stop. Stripping out “excess capital” first shrinks the denominator and mechanically inflates the result. So 40-50 per cent is Storonsky’s own view of capital efficiency, not a number that lines up against a rival’s published, unadjusted ROE.
The interview lands alongside reports that Revolut is exploring a dual listing in New York and London, with a valuation as high as $200bn floated within two years, on top of the $115bn secondary sale that already made Storonsky worth an estimated $33bn.
The temptation is to treat “effectively zero risk” as a description of Revolut, full stop, and by extension as the shape the rest of the neobank sector is bending towards. Neither claim survives contact with what Revolut’s peers are actually doing, or with Revolut’s own recent record.
The sector is splitting in two directions, not converging on this model
Start with the peer set investors actually compare Revolut to. None of them is adopting Storonsky’s model; most are already doing something structurally different.
Wise has never taken the other side of this bet at all: it doesn’t lend customer money out, by design, and has been profitable since 2017 on a pure payments-infrastructure model. Chime runs a similar model in the US, holding no banking licence and routing deposits through partner banks, Stride Bank and The Bancorp Bank.
Neither is really running a bank in the traditional sense of taking deposits and turning them into loans. Revolut’s own 76 per cent fee-income share puts it closer to that camp than to a conventional lender, whatever the banking licences on the wall say.
That’s real zero credit risk by structure, but on 2025 revenue of $2.2bn, Chime reported net income of just $45mn, a fraction of the margin Storonsky claims. Avoiding lending risk, on its own, plainly doesn’t produce a 40-50 per cent return; something else in Revolut’s mix, likely scale, FX, subscriptions and crypto, is doing that work.
The European comparators are moving the opposite way. Starling, profitable for five straight years on £887mn of 2025 revenue and £217mn of pre-tax profit, built part of that profitability by buying into mortgage risk it didn’t originate organically: a £1.75bn book via its 2021 purchase of Fleet Mortgages, then a further £500mn portfolio bought from Masthaven in 2022.
Monzo, which only turned its first annual profit in the year to March 2024, saw loan-loss provisions nearly double to £204mn that same year as its lending book scaled.
Monzo’s own FY2026 results show revenue up 39 per cent to £1.7bn and deposits at £25.7bn, growth on the same trajectory as its credit exposure. The profit figure the bank leads with is an adjusted £172.6mn pre-tax number; statutory pre-tax profit was £87.3mn, with an FCA fine and restructuring charges accounting for most of the gap. The same pattern as Storonsky’s own ROE: the headline number is a management-adjusted one, not the plain statutory figure.
Nubank, at more than 140mn customers across Latin America and the US, treats consumer lending as a core, expanding product line, not an afterthought.
Put together, that looks much more like a sector split into two entirely different routes to scale than a quiet copying of Revolut’s balance sheet. Revolut’s route so far sits closer to Wise’s than to Monzo’s or Starling’s, just wrapped in a full banking licence they don’t have.
What “zero risk” doesn’t cover, and who’s actually been hurt by it
That distinction matters, because it exposes what the “effectively zero risk” framing is actually a claim about: credit risk, specifically, on Revolut’s own retained loan book. It isn’t a claim about compliance risk, financial-crime controls, or the operational strain of expanding into more than 40 countries at speed, and that is precisely the category where this sector, Revolut included, keeps getting caught out.
Revolut’s own record supplies the clearest example. Per the FT interview, the bank spent 2021 to 2023 in dispute with auditors over the origin of some of its revenue, and was fined last year over insufficient anti-money-laundering controls.
Hours before Storonsky sat down with the FT in Paris, Revolut had handed over personal data on hundreds of wealthy clients to fraudsters posing as Italian government officials, who are now demanding a $3mn ransom not to sell it on. None of that shows up in a loan-to-deposit ratio.
It isn’t a Revolut-specific pattern, either. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority fined Monzo £21mn in 2025 for inadequate financial-crime controls, after the bank was found to have accepted implausible UK addresses, including Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street, when opening accounts.
Starling was fined £28.96mn by the FCA on 27 September 2024, discounted 30 per cent from £40.96mn for early settlement, after opening more than 54,000 accounts for 49,000 high-risk customers in breach of its own restriction, and after its sanctions-screening system checked only UK-based individuals from 2017 onward. In the FCA’s own words, financial-crime controls “failed to keep pace” as Starling grew from 43,000 to 3.6mn customers.
Germany’s BaFin has kept N26 under a customer-growth cap for years over comparable weaknesses, and in 2025 tightened supervisory oversight further and restricted parts of its business, including new mortgage lending in the Netherlands.
Four different neobanks, disciplined by their regulators for the same category of failure. It’s the one category “effectively zero risk” was never designed to touch.
The judgement
Storonsky’s balance-sheet design is genuinely effective, and the licensing run, the UK in March, France weeks ago, is a real institutional achievement, built up over years of work with the same regulators now signing off on it. That’s worth crediting to him directly, on its own terms.
The US step is further along than a “green light” suggests. The OCC granted conditional approval for a Revolut Bank US national charter on 4 September 2026, subject to a minimum $95mn capitalisation and a 10 per cent tier-1 leverage floor for three years. The FDIC and the Federal Reserve still have to sign off before it can open, with a 2027 target.
Effectively zero risk is a fair description of Revolut’s credit exposure. But it says nothing about financial-crime controls, and the sector’s own recent history is why that distinction matters: every neobank compared here that has actually stumbled in the past two years stumbled on financial-crime controls, not credit losses.
Revolut hasn’t escaped that pattern either; it has simply had it happen in parallel with a good quarter for its loan book. For a bank now angling for a $200bn listing on the strength of its risk management, that’s the number an investor should be asking about, not the 6 per cent.
