Revolut founder Nik Storonsky cashes in

Nik Storonsky, Founder & CEO, Revolut during Web Summit Rio 2023 — (Image credit: Getty Images)

Revolut’s founder Nik Storonsky is cashing in. He plans to offload a small proportion of his stake as part of an imminent secondary share sale that could value the outfit he co-founded in 2015 at $40 billion, says Sky, cementing its status as the UK’s most valuable start-up.

The deal may alleviate some of the frustration over the continued delay in being granted a UK banking licence. Despite growing at breakneck speed (Revolut now has 40 million customers), and notching up a record £438 million in profits last year on sales that nearly doubled to £1.8 billion, that crucial piece of paper remains elusive. Three years after Revolut applied for the licence – which would open the door to new income streams – UK regulators continue to pull in their horns.

Among the hurdles were reports last year highlighting the “release of funds from accounts flagged by the National Crime Agency as suspicious”. Storonksy, 40, finds it hard to contain his irritation with British politicians and regulators. Last year he threatened to take what would be a landmark flotation for the London Stock Exchange elsewhere. It may not have helped that his father is a director of a subsidiary of the sanctioned Russian gas giant, Gazprom. Storonsky, who has held British citizenship since 2004, renounced his Russian “birth” citizenship in October 2022 and has roundly condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, says Bloomberg. Perhaps for some, that wasn’t enough.

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Born in 1984 in Dolgoprudny, a town 20 kilometres north of Moscow, during the dying years of the old Soviet Union, Storonsky grew up in a Russia that was embracing “Western-style democracy and a free-market economy”, says Fintech Magazine. Like his father, he excelled at science, taking a masters degree in physics at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and adding a second one in economics. As well as being a brilliant student, he was “a keen athlete” – a state champion swimmer who also took boxing lessons. He’s still “an avid kite surfer” who enjoys the adrenaline rush.

Nik Storonsky and Revolut's boom

Aged 20 Storonsky moved to London, landing a trading job with Lehman Brothers before jumping ship to Credit Suisse when the Wall Street investment bank collapsed in 2007. The long hours shaped his unforgiving work ethic, but he found banking bureaucracy stifling, once observing that “if you fired 80% of bankers, nothing would change”.

Inspired by the example of “the new digital neobank start-ups” emerging in Asia, he left to found Revolut in 2015 with Vladyslav Yatsenko, a British-Ukrainian software developer. The plan, says Reuters, was to undercut mainstream lenders with a mobile app offering travellers fee-free foreign exchange – and then convert them into daily users with products ranging from stock and crypto trading to daily budget management.

As a much-hyped tech “challenger” bank, Revolut grew fast – expanding into Europe via a bridgehead in Lithuania, where it was granted an EU banking licence in 2021. The same year, a funding round led by Japan’s SoftBank and Tiger Global Management saw the group hit a valuation of $33 billion – eclipsing NatWest’s.

The firm had a ferocious work ethic – Wired Magazine published an internal email from Storonsky warning that underperformers would be “fired without any negotiations”. Indeed, in its quest to gain a banking licence, Revolut has proved a revolving door for a host of risk and compliance officers, notes the BBC. Now Storonsky has embarked on a new venture, says Fortune – a quantitative investment firm for early-stage firms that uses algorithms and AI to source deals. Having disrupted banking so effectively, he is “looking to pull off a similar feat in venture capital” with his Quantumlight fund.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors (BSME) editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.