Revolut launches personal loans in UK, taking on major banks

By Lawrence White and Tommy Reggiori Wilkes

LONDON, Oct 26 (Reuters) - Digital bank Revolut has begun offering unsecured personal loans in Britain, its UK chief executive Francesca Carlesi told Reuters, taking Europe's most valuable startup into a lucrative consumer lending market dominated by the country's biggest banks.

The move pushes Revolut beyond its core payments and subscription products and into a riskier business as it seeks to compete more directly with lenders including NatWest, Lloyds, Barclays, Santander's UK business and HSBC.

"We want to transition from being a very successful everyday spending app and disrupting the market, to become effectively the primary bank of choice for everybody in the UK," Carlesi said.

Revolut will also launch a credit card product in the near future, Carlesi said, part of a broader effort to increase the income it generates from each customer, a metric by which it lags traditional banks.

Since its creation in 2015 by CEO Nik Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko, London-based Revolut has grown worldwide to serve more than 80 million customers and commands a private valuation of $115 billion, bigger than listed rivals like Barclays and NatWest.

Yet the bank still faces questions over whether it can sustain its breakneck growth with per-customer revenue well below rivals along with the proportion of its customers using Revolut for their primary bank account and paying salaries in.

Revolut's rapid growth has also drawn regulatory and operational scrutiny. In 2025, Lithuania's central bank imposed a record €3.5 million fine over shortcomings in transaction-monitoring controls, while this month it was among financial firms hit by an hours-long Google Cloud ⁠outage.

OFFLOADING THE RISK       

While Revolut already offers unsecured loans in some other countries, Britain is one of its biggest markets.    

Carlesi said Revolut will initially take a cautious approach, offering loans to a selected group of customers and expanding to its 14 million customers in Britain over the coming months.

The loans will range from £2,000 to £25,000, with rates of 6.9% to 29.3%, a Revolut spokesperson said.

Without the decades of customer spending and repayment data held by traditional banks, Revolut has supplemented its underwriting with information purchased from external providers, Carlesi said, adding that the company was confident about its credit analysis.

Revolut will expand lending gradually and does not have a target for its overall lending in Britain, Carlesi said.

The bank will eventually look to offload much of its risk via securitisation, aiming to keep its loan-to-deposit ratio close to 6%, far lower than other banks, she said.

Carlesi said Revolut also eventually plans to enter the highly competitive market for mortgages in Britain.

Revolut's lending push comes amid persistent cost-of-living challenges in Britain worsened by a soft labour market and rising inflation, which could weigh on borrowers' ability to repay debt.

(Reporting by Lawrence White and Tommy Reggiori Wilkes; Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)