Revolut Starts Offering Traditional Banking Services and Will Roll Out In Bulgaria as Soon as it Obtains a Local Currency License

The race of the European Challenger banks, which we experienced in 2018, continues: The UK startup Revolut, founded in 2015, has now obtained a banking license in Lithuania. The two founders Vlad Yatsenko and Nikolay Storonsky have been working on this for more than a year. With the bank license, they can now offer their more than three million users traditional banking services such as full current accounts, consumer and business lending and overdrafts.

According to the official press release, the company will start rolling out its services  in the key markets UK, France, Poland and Germany, and then expand to smaller countries. “I don’t have an ETA for implementation in Bulgaria, we’ll begin to roll out in the next 3 to 6 months”, Dimitris Litsikakis, Country Manager Greece, Cyprus and Malta, told Trending Topics.  “In Bulgaria, we could experience a huge growth if we have license for the local currency. It’s coming soon, we are working on it”, Litsikakis told us earlier this year.

What does it mean?

According to Revolut, the banking license, which protects users’ deposits under the European Deposit Insurance Scheme (EDIT) with up to € 100,000, will first be activated in the core markets. In addition, users throughout Europe should be able to trade shares free of charge via the app.

Race with N26 continues

The big competitor of Revolut is N26. N26 co-founder Valentin Stalf recently announced that his startup in Berlin is two million users holding. Both companies are endowed with hundreds of millions of euros by venture capitalists and are racing for new markets. So both companies want to start next year in the US, Revolut also wants to launch its product in Canada, Singapore, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

Revolut currently has between 8K and 10K new users daily. How the banking license will affect this growth is still unpredictable due to the fact that the registration process could be more complicated because of the European Know Your Customer (KYC) regulation.