Nik Storonsky got his British passport in 2013 and quit his job at Credit Suisse the same day, according to a 2020 Financial Times profile. He had been trading equity derivatives in London since 2006 and had several business ideas, but he told the FT that “what was keeping me in the job was my visa.” Thirteen years on, the company he started has been valued at $115bn in a share sale that Revolut confirmed as completed on 4 November, and it has more than 80 million retail customers in over 40 countries, TechCrunch reported.

A physicist and swimmer from outside Moscow

Nik Storonsky was born on 21 July 1984 in Dolgoprudny, a town just north of Moscow. His father is a physicist and engineer who studied at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, the same institute his son would later attend. As a boy he took up boxing and swimming. At university he became a champion swimmer, the FT reported.

He took two master’s degrees in 2007, one in general and applied physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and one in applied economics and finance at the New Economic School. By then he was already in London.

Nik Storonsky on the trading floor

Nik Storonsky moved to England in 2006 to trade equity derivatives at Lehman Brothers, then switched to Credit Suisse in 2008, shortly before the financial crisis. At Credit Suisse he met Vlad Yatsenko, a software engineer who had worked at Deutsche Bank and UBS and who joined Revolut as chief technology officer and became its co-founder.

The job stopped holding Nik Storonsky’s interest. He told Bloomberg in 2017 that he had already reached the maximum as a banker and that the work had become very boring. Revolut’s own account of its founder says he saw first-hand, as a trader, the high fees charged on foreign exchange, and that this was the start of the idea. He set up Revolut Ltd in December 2013.

A travel card built around foreign exchange fees

The first product was a prepaid card and app that let people spend abroad at the interbank exchange rate without the mark-ups banks added. A prototype was ready in early 2015 and Revolut launched in July that year. Early customers used it mainly for fee-free exchange rates when they travelled, Nik Storonsky told Crowdfund Insider in 2017. He told Bloomberg the same year that the plan had always been to go beyond foreign exchange.

Some of the early money came from the public. In 2016 Revolut raised £1m through crowdfunding as part of its Series A. More than 10,000 people pledged over £17m, and the company could take only 457 of them, he said. Index Ventures, one of its venture backers, first invested that year, the FT reported.

From card company to licensed bank

The next decade was as much about licences as about products. Revolut gained a UK e-money licence in 2017 and then a banking licence in Lithuania, which gave it a base in the European Union, and it later became a fully licensed bank under European Central Bank supervision. By 2021 Bloomberg was describing it as a $33bn fintech.

The UK took longer. Revolut received a banking licence with restrictions in July 2024 and then went through mobilisation, the stage in which a new bank has to show regulators it is ready to operate in full. It came out of mobilisation in March 2026, the company said in its 2025 annual results. Those results showed revenue up 46 per cent to $6.0bn and profit before tax up 57 per cent to $2.3bn, with 68.3 million retail customers at the end of 2025. In 2026 it has also launched banks in Mexico, Australia and New Zealand, TechCrunch reported, and it has secured banking licences in France, Colombia and Argentina.

How Nik Storonsky thinks about building

Nik Storonsky expects many bets to fail and keeps placing them anyway. “You try things, sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t,” he told the FT in 2020. In the same interview he said that if the company simply relaxed, it would at some point stagnate, and he described a team that built one product after another. Some did not work out, but the team became much better at building and much more precise in its ideas.

Speed has always been part of it. In 2017 he told Bloomberg that Revolut was trying to launch as fast as possible, and that speed mattered more than setting a target for how big it should grow. Two years later he told Bloomberg that cutting corners was not possible in Revolut’s environment. As he put it to the FT, in the end it is all about people.

Outside Revolut, Nik Storonsky founded QuantumLight in 2023, a venture fund that uses its own AI platform to find later-stage companies to back. TIME named him to its TIME100 Next list in 2024.

What to Watch Next for Nik Storonsky and Revolut

The November sale brought in no new money. It let existing holders sell at a price 53 per cent above the one set a year earlier, with Glade Brook Capital Partners, Coatue, Durable Capital Partners, T. Rowe Price and Baillie Gifford leading, according to TechCrunch. Fintechbits looked at what the $115bn price says about Revolut when it closed. “Every bank we launch means more people get a better way to manage their money, wherever they live,” Nik Storonsky said in a statement reported by tech.eu, naming 100 million customers as the next milestone.

The thing to watch is the United States. On 3 September Revolut won conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to form a national bank, which Nik Storonsky called an important first step. It plans to open that bank in the first half of 2027, subject to final approval, and a stock market listing would come no earlier than 2028, TechCrunch reported. Chime, whose founder Chris Britt Fintechbits profiled on 3 November, has agreed to buy a bank instead. Revolut is building its own, and the OCC’s final decision is the next date to look out for.