# Nik Storonsky: The most uncompromising banking CEO Cheeky Pint · 2026-11-10 · 52 min · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NARhJ7jAj4 ## Transcript John Collison Do you want to go head-to-head, Amex Platinum and Chase Sapphire? Nik Storonsky Yeah. John Collison How will you compete? John Collison Nik Storonsky is the co-founder and CEO of Revolut, one of the world's leading neobanks. They started with foreign exchange, but now do everything from bank accounts to business services to mobile plans. And they're expanding to the United States. John Collison Cheers. Nik Storonsky Cheers. John Collison As you look back on it, how did Revolut get to scale? What worked and caused growth? Nik Storonsky To be honest, I was never optimizing to get scale quickly. I was just working on the product and solving problems end-to-end. Initially, when I started, we had probably 1–10 customers per day. Then it went to 100 customers, then to 500, and then to 1,000. Now we have about 100,000 customers joining every day. I was never trying to optimize to get as many customers as possible. I was more focused on building the product, gaining licenses, and so on. John Collison But you presumably thought a lot about distribution dynamics and how to get customers to refer other customers and things like that. The growth, consumer growth side of things? Nik Storonsky Yeah, we actually started doing growth, I think, in 2022. That was the first time we started having serious budgets for growth. John Collison But you didn't for the first 7 years of— Nik Storonsky No, we didn't. It was purely organic. That's when we built all the models, paybacks or TVs per customer, and also built a referral marketing product. John Collison But the first 7 years were just organic, building financial products you thought were good? Nik Storonsky Yeah. John Collison How did people discover them? Nik Storonsky Word of mouth. Plus, we've obviously done PR as well. John Collison What were the best products from an acquisition point of view? Nik Storonsky The best product was initially the first product that we launched. It was a multi-currency card with zero FX fees. John Collison It's interesting that both you and Wise were able to get to scale based on consumers' frustrations with FX fees. The frustration with the incumbents in that product was so high that it birthed multiple successful fintechs. Nik Storonsky Probably. If you look at banks, the majority of products are actually very bad. It's not only multi-currency transfers, but also credit, business credit, business products—almost every single product is really bad. Acquiring used to be the bank, right? I think it wasn't about multi-currency transfers or cards. It was more that we picked a certain product and made it so much better. It could have been acquiring, which you've done. It could have been credit as well, wealth and trading. Robinhood did it. John Collison So you think there's nothing special about starting with multi-currency cards. You think you could have, in another universe, started with checking accounts— Nik Storonsky Yeah. I think as soon as you build a much better product than banks, which is also much cheaper, then it's pretty easy. John Collison What was the second product that worked? When did you prove to yourself that this wasn't a fluke, and that you could repeatedly build financial products? Nik Storonsky Business accounts. We built business accounts. The offering wasn't about multi-currency cards anymore; it was a digital bank account. Without any marketing, we first started with probably 10 business customers a day. Now we're onboarding maybe 1,500 business customers a day. Only about 30% of it is paid marketing. The rest is still organic. John Collison One of the things that, looking at Silicon Valley's successful product companies, tells you is there are many, many paths to heaven. There are many ways to build a successful product organization. Apple famously doesn't do any focus group testing. They just build the products that they know in their heart of hearts are right, in this very functional organization. And then you have Google or Facebook developing products in totally different ways. What is the Revolut system for building products? Nik Storonsky We just put together a small team of 10 people: smart people, smart product owners, good designers, good developers. We just build what makes sense from a first-principles point of view. It can be either replicating an existing product but building it so much better, or trying new products that we think make sense. But to be honest, everything new is forgotten old. We haven't built any product that worked that wasn't an old product built badly by other organizations. We have an internal “new bets” process where everyone in the company can raise an idea, and then it goes through validation. If the idea is validated, it goes to what we'll call a committee of people who've done it before, and then they decide whether to fund the idea or not. John Collison What's validation? Nik Storonsky First, I think it goes to the team that validates unit economics, financials, and so on—whether it makes sense. In the majority of cases, it makes sense because the cost of the team is pretty low compared with the value of the idea if it's useful for customers. They pay for it, and you can generate tens of millions of dollars, compared with the cost of the team, which is small. Then it goes to the people who have built new bets before, and then to general managers. They also validate it from a purely common-sense perspective. If everything is approved, then we separate a small team. We hire additional people there. Then they build a product within 9–18 months, and then we look at the growth of the product. If there is a lot of growth, then we scale up the team. One team becomes two teams, three teams, four teams, a department, and so on. For the bets that don't grow, we sunset them. For bets that grow but not very fast, we just leave them alone. John Collison I'm surprised that ideas would need to be validated economically, because you're distributing products across millions of customers. Won't the cost of a—can't any idea support a 5–10-person engineering team to go develop a V1 of it? It's very unlikely that a product won't work economically when you have such a large customer base and you can fix it with pricing. Nik Storonsky An example is Revolut Lite, which we launched across 100+ countries without the banking license and without our e-money license. It was purely a money transfer business. The idea was to build Venmo internationally. It didn't really work out because we thought distribution costs would be much lower. It didn't grow organically fast enough, so we had to do performance marketing. The unit economics with the performance marketing didn't really work in terms of payback. In the majority of cases, 90% of the time, yes, you're right. If it works out, it works out very well financially. But there are some exceptions that you still need to validate. John Collison Brian Armstrong from Coinbase has talked about how, when he was first pitched USDC, he thought it was kind of a silly idea. He wasn't convinced. But, sure, okay, if you guys want to go work on that, have at it. Are there ideas that came to you that you were initially not fully convinced by, but that ended up being successful? Nik Storonsky To be honest, in 99% of cases, I'm always up for new ideas and just try them— John Collison You're just open-minded, yeah. Nik Storonsky Yeah. John Collison Maybe it's an idea that surprised you. You didn't expect it to work. You were open-minded, but you were pessimistic. Then it outperformed your expectations. Nik Storonsky I just had too many failures in the past when my judgment was wrong, so now I'm fully optimistic. I think it's not about the idea, even though ideas are important. I think it's about execution, to be honest with you. You can make almost any idea work. John Collison Can you? Even the bad ones? Nik Storonsky If it's not that bad, then you can make it work, provided you spend enough effort and enough time on it. John Collison And people are bringing you the plausible ideas. Nik Storonsky If the team is very strong, then even if the idea is average, you can still make it work. There are cases when the idea is great and the business model is great, but the team can be bad. It can still fly. John Collison What's your favorite example of the “great idea, great team” intersection? Nik Storonsky I think our subscriptions team is very good. When they came and said, “Okay, we want to launch an additional Ultra subscription,” I thought the idea was okay. It ended up being an amazing bet because it's a very expensive subscription. Ultra is effectively the Ultra bank account. You pay about €50 per month, I think, but then it gives you a lot of additional benefits. I thought, “The idea is okay. This business probably won't be very large.” It ended up being a very, very large business. John Collison The closest comparison is kind of like an Amex Premium card— Nik Storonsky Amex Premium, yeah. John Collison Yes, yes. I'm so interested to hear you say that growth dynamics were not critical in the early days of Revolut. Firstly, so many financial products spread because a payment transaction has two legs. It's just very well suited to viral product growth, whether it be Bill.com or PayPal, where you can send money to an email address even if they are not signed up for PayPal. It's a very classic acquisition dynamic. It's interesting to me that that wasn't the case for you. And also, the peer-to-peer product is now so successful. Nik Storonsky Peer-to-peer is definitely an acquisition driver, especially in countries where they don't have a very good payment system. John Collison Yes. Nik Storonsky So, for example, in certain markets in Europe, we— John Collison Ireland. Nik Storonsky Ireland, yeah, is one of them. Nik Storonsky Romania is another. So yes, it worked in many markets where the bank payment system is pretty old. John Collison Okay. Nik Storonsky But I wouldn’t say it was the primary acquisition channel. John Collison Yeah. I would draw a distinction between word of mouth, where someone has to go to a bar and tell you, “Hey, I discovered this great new product last night,” and viral product adoption mechanics, where if I want to pay you money, you become a Revolut user, and then you can tune it. It’s like, “Have you thought of sending money?” You can promote that. Meta does a very good job at this. When they want to grow new parts of the product, they promote them in the app. Again, you have knobs and dials that you can use. The in-product growth stuff feels to me— Nik Storonsky Yeah, of course. We tried a lot of things, P2P included. The problem with banking products is KYC onboarding, right? There’s a lot of friction. Even if you have these viral things, then— John Collison There’s a steeper drop-off. Nik Storonsky Yeah. There’s a lot of drop-off. It’s not really viral. Plus, you cannot really sell it worldwide, right? You always need to sell into countries where you have licenses. John Collison Yes, but it can be viral in the same way Facebook was viral in the early days, where they would go college campus by college campus. You can’t do the cross-border transfers, but there’s so much activity within a country that you can get viral growth within a country. Nik Storonsky Yeah, if you can onboard users in one click. Like Facebook, then yes. John Collison Yeah, yeah. Do you think the KYC is a bigger impediment? Nik Storonsky When we first launched, there was a lot of virality because we were doing onboarding. I think it was up to €1,000 or €100 that you could do without KYC. Back then, the regulation allowed us to do it. So there was a lot of virality, but then I think it was stopped in 2017 or something. John Collison So the KYC changes actually made the viral growth loop a little harder. Nik Storonsky Oh yeah, 100%. John Collison Though you can presumably still do a lot of nice viral growth, where if there’s money waiting for you and you just need to go through KYC to claim it, then you can do one leg of the transaction and not complete it, right? And that will still be plenty enticing for a customer. Nik Storonsky That’s true. We also have it. But again, this K-factor is never a legitimate one. You cannot really experience exponential growth. It’s always less than 1. John Collison Could you not? There could be a K > 1 product. I’m not too pessimistic. Nik Storonsky Everything we’ve tried so far in the last 12 years has always been less than 1. John Collison Okay. You’re in the K-is-less-than-1 business. The other thing I find interesting about Revolut’s business is that you’re a bank whose primary revenue source is not net interest margin, which is obviously unlike other banks. Did you arrive at this accidentally? Was it part of your thesis for Revolut? You’re very different in that way, and it’s quite asymmetric versus other banks. Nik Storonsky I think the answer is pretty simple. We started in the UK and Europe, where conditions are very tough for startups. Interchange is very low, and credit is extremely regulated. You cannot really charge customers a very high interest rate, as you can in Mexico or Brazil, for example. So you’ll have 10, 20, 30 startups starting in financial services, and the majority will die, right? We were forced to optimize our transactional business and effectively make it profitable. If we had started in Brazil or Mexico, we would obviously have focused on credit business because it’s less regulated compared to Europe. We would make a lot of money on credit business. But in Europe, it’s not possible. John Collison But aren’t you developing a balance sheet? You have one side of it, which is the deposits. You could build the other side with loans. Nik Storonsky Yeah, but before we got deposits, we couldn’t build a credit business. Now we’re doing credit business. Now, yes, we— John Collison Will you build a traditional bank credit business where you have the deposit side and the loan side, or will it look atypical in some way? Nik Storonsky Well, I think our business model, and my personal opinion, is that we want to have the least amount of risk. Even if we lend, it won’t be a large portion of the balance sheet. At the moment, the target state is less than 10%, and then the rest we would securitize. John Collison Why? Nik Storonsky First, the simpler the model, the better from a regulatory point of view. Plus, if we want to be a tech business, we’d rather be in the subscription business. As soon as you go into the lending business, your multiples become similar to banking multiples. If you look at tech business multiples, you can usually get 40–50 P/E. In the banking business, you’ll be lucky if you get 10 P/E. John Collison But is that because—I'm always skeptical of multiples-based arguments because, ultimately, the business is good or it isn’t. You can educate investors if the business is in fact good. When we started Stripe, people thought payments businesses were horrendous and deserved low multiples and everything like that. Over time, they came to appreciate payments businesses more. But if we had been fixated on the multiple that people ascribed to the business, we might have been scared off this path. I think you just need to decide: “Is this a lower-quality or higher-quality profit pool?” So do you think it’s actually a lower-quality profit pool, or do investors just have a weird hang-up? Nik Storonsky I think it’s more the business itself. If you look at the credit business in banking, the general credit business, every time you do a loan or a credit card, you need to put provisions against it. In reality, the amount of these provisions is highly dependent on the models that you use and on economic conditions. You don’t know whether, in 3, 4, or 5 years, you’ll receive the loan back, right? You model it. On average, you hope to receive the money back, but things can change, right? This uncertainty is priced in by investors, generally through lower multiples. The bank can produce a lot of money now from the credit portfolio. But look, in 2–3 years’ time, unemployment goes from 3% to 6%. John Collison Yep. Nik Storonsky And all the profit is gone, right? Plus, they’re losing money. So I think this strategy— John Collison Okay. You think, fundamentally, making your money via credit is this very cyclical profit stream that can be entirely wiped out in a downturn. It’s very sensitive to you doing the math right. Whereas the nice thing about subscriptions is, ultimately, people are paying you this money on a recurring basis. In a downturn, maybe some people cancel their subscriptions, but you can’t make negative money on subscriptions. You can only shrink the book slightly, so it’s much higher quality. Nik Storonsky Yeah, exactly. It’s similar to selling options, right? You collect the premium for 10 years, and then in year 11, you lose it all, right? That’s a problem. John Collison Okay. I want to go back to your product development methodology, though. You’re describing the early stages: there are some top-down product ideas and some bottom-up product ideas. They have to be validated so that, if they work, they can actually be interesting economically. You have a talented product leader and a few engineers working on it. Then what? How do you decide which products get the in-product distribution? How do they earn that? How much are you willing to give them credit for, “Oh, I think this will become a good product over time”? Product developers always tell you, “I would be doing very well if you just gave me more distribution.” The product people like to blame distribution. The distribution people like to blame the product. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how the scale-up works. Nik Storonsky Basically, it’s pretty simple, right? We’ve got the team. They’ll work on the product for up to 18 months. Then hopefully, they’ll launch the product. John Collison They’ll work up to 18 months before launching anything? Nik Storonsky From the moment we decide to launch to launch is usually 12–18 months. It takes time to get the team, onboard the team, build the product, and go through the approval process on the banking side. So 18 months is probably a good number. John Collison Because you’re a regulated bank, do you have to go to your bank regulator to get sign-off on the product? Nik Storonsky It’s not a bank regulator, but more like the internal governance process. John Collison Oh, I see. You’re internally—yeah. Nik Storonsky We will launch the product, and then we release it. We first release it in a test country, for example, Ireland or the UK, or whatever. Then, if it works—if everything is fine—we release it to more countries, and more countries, and more countries. We add it to our cross-sell engine as well, which is automated. There is no distribution problem, right? It’s automatically being added to, hopefully, the whole user base if everything works fine. And because we’ve done it for a long time now, we already have historical data on the performance of about 100 bets. Then we just look at month 1 after launch: “What is the gross profit compared to previous bets?” Month 2. Month 3. Month 4. Month 12. And then: “How does it stack up with all the other bets?” If it’s in the top 25% quantile of all the bets, we just scale it up. We hire more people. We have 2 teams, 3 teams, 4 teams, and so on. For the bottom 25%, we don’t do much. We redistribute the team to do something else. Nik Storonsky Then in the middle, sometimes we keep the team. Sometimes we don't keep the team. John Collison Is a new product like that actually an option, or are there costs to shutting it down? Are consumers annoyed if they were relying on a product and then it goes away? Or are there some products where, if you had a pension product, you actually just can't turn that off because it's their pension? Do you think about the cost of shutting off a product when you decide to fund it? Does that differ by product? Nik Storonsky Yeah, of course. We look at customer detriment, right? If there are already customers using the product and there is detriment, we just keep it as it is. We stop investing in it, so we just maintain it. John Collison Can you tell me about the automated cross-sell machine? Nik Storonsky Automated cross-sell machine. Well, basically, we have many products on the platform. Then we effectively have a machine learning model that decides, based on certain events and the customer profile, which product is most suitable at this point in time. For example, you land in Ireland, you have a UK account with Revolut, and then we offer you an eSIM, because you're landing in Ireland and you spend money on Airalo. We see all the transactions, so we can offer you one of our products. On top of that, we also have an LLM model that effectively behaves as an account manager. Through human reasoning, it looks at all the products, all the events, and all of the suggestions generated by the machine learning model, and then decides which product to push to the customer at this particular point in time. It's all automated. John Collison I hadn't thought that you're in a much better position to cross-sell products than anyone else because you see what people are spending money on— Nik Storonsky Yes, as well. Yeah. John Collison You can just... If they're overpaying for something, you kind of know. Nik Storonsky I mean, we don't see the full details of the bill, right? We just see the transaction. John Collison The cross-sell engine has some propensity model for the customer. You're basically trying to find the conversion-maximizing sale, like the thing they're most likely to buy next? Nik Storonsky It's a bit more complex than that. It's not only conversion. It also takes into account GP and the product, and we also try not to spam customers, so there's a certain negative value to our message to a customer. Altogether, the model makes a decision. John Collison It's interesting that you describe products needing to perform well on a revenue cohort curve. It's a little like a race, where your job is to stay in the pack or stay at the front of the pack, but you're judged relative to other products. Have you ever had slow-burn products that, for whatever reason, had a gradual start? Maybe the team was just learning exactly how this works, but that wasn't actually a negative signal about the product. It just took a while for them to get going, and then it really took off? Nik Storonsky To be honest, it's almost never happened. I don't even remember an example when something was growing slowly and then started growing fast. Usually, the trend is your friend. If something is growing very quickly in the first 12 months, it will continue to grow very quickly. John Collison A classic bigger-company behavior might be to say, “Oh, this isn't working yet, but there's a good reason for it,” and blah, blah, blah. You think those are all excuses, and the trend is your friend? Nik Storonsky Yeah. I mean, the general statistical trend is your friend, yeah. John Collison Why don't other companies operate in this Revolut model of developing many additional products to cross-sell to the customer? It feels applicable to many other consumer companies. Grading them against the curve of how other products have done at a similar age, I don't think most companies—even those that sell multiple products—are that strict. Instead, they make excuses for why the product isn't performing: “Oh yeah, we just need more staffing.” They're not as strict. Nik Storonsky I think the majority of companies don't do many bets at all, right? Because we've done a lot of bets, we have a feedback loop compared to other companies. Because of that, we're very strict. John Collison Yes. Nik Storonsky Other companies probably do 7–8 bets. The feedback loop is delayed, plus management changes. As a result, they never end up implementing any strict process on new bets. John Collison Are there products you've done that have not been well suited to this model? I can imagine a product that involves changing many different parts of the Revolut experience would be hard to fit into this new-bet model, because it's fundamentally much more infrastructure rewiring or something like that. Do you sometimes have to do products that don't fit into this standalone-bet model? Nik Storonsky To be honest, you can fit any product into this model, even if it's a product that's very new to us. For example, it might not be a financial product; it can be a B2B product. We've done a bet called Revolut People. We built an HR system internally for ourselves, and we decided to make it a new bet. Then we separated it into a standalone team, and we sell it externally. It's kind of a new bet, but we cannot really cross-sell it to our retail customers. John Collison What about products that just don't generate revenue by design? Imagine if I'm a product leader and I'm building a financial insights product. It generates a lot of engagement with the app because it sends people a summary of their transaction activity and ways to spend money. The point is not revenue. The point is app engagement. How would you grade my success? Nik Storonsky We still have P&L attribution to it by indirect attribution of P&L, because you can also calculate it. John Collison You have some churn model. Nik Storonsky We'll have 2 numbers. One is direct GP, and another one is indirect GP. John Collison So I have some synthetic profit that I can attribute to myself because I saved this many customers from churning by having them come back to the app and/or spend incrementally. Nik Storonsky I'll give you an example. We have RevPoints. It was also a new bet. John Collison What is RevPoints? Is that rewards? Nik Storonsky RevPoints is more like a rewards system, yes. You get points, and then you can effectively use these points to buy additional products that we offer. Accounting GP is very small, but if you calculate indirect GP, that's very high. John Collison That's very interesting. I feel like a lot of the most successful companies get to an understanding of their economic equation and then take that very seriously. Amazon says, “An incremental Prime subscriber is extremely valuable, so we're going to set up a movie studio to drive more Prime subscriptions.” It sounds crazy, but if you really believe the math on how much a Prime subscriber is worth, then it makes sense. Google was always very fixated on just how valuable the incremental search customer was because of the lifetime value of the advertising revenue. So they'd do all sorts of crazy things, like pay a lot of money to become the default Safari search box. But again, it was all that attributed P&L. You think the attributed P&L revenue is very important, so that you can create accountability with product teams and know if something's working. Nik Storonsky Yeah, ultimately you need to have one number that defines whether a product is successful or not. John Collison Yeah. I think a lot of companies actually don't do that, to a surprising extent. They don't chase through the full accountability with a synthetic revenue number. How important is the way people think about neobanks? As I understand it, whether there's an account or “an account” is whether people deposit their paychecks. A majority of Ireland uses Revolut to some degree. They might just use it for peer-to-peer or something like that, but they have an account. Then there's using Revolut as your primary bank account, which in the banking industry people basically think of as: “Do you get your paycheck deposited there?” How important is it that you move people from being a lightweight user to a heavyweight user, from occasionally using certain features to actually being the place where the paycheck is deposited? Nik Storonsky I mean, it's super important, obviously, right? Because as soon as you get a salary into the account, people use a lot of other products that we have. If they're just using P2P, they load $20 and send money to someone. It's not very profitable for us. We spend a lot of effort to move people's salaries to Revolut. Overall, I mean, it depends on the country. 10–20% of our monthly active users have salaried accounts. John Collison What moves people over? Nik Storonsky It's a very slow burner, right? We actually spend a lot of time and effort building products for kids. As soon as we capture kids, we can easily move them to the 18+ account, because it's very hard to move adults. John Collison Yes. It's a tale as old as time. I remember when I was in secondary school, maybe a similar experience. John Collison The local bank came and gave us a soda and a bag of chips to sit through a presentation on how to save money. Then they gave us all a bank account. They were in the school, acquiring customers aged 13 or 14, on the theory that bank accounts are very sticky. You see very different behaviors from people. Presumably, if you have 10–20% primary banking share among the regular population, that’s much higher among the younger population because they’re Revolut-native. Nik Storonsky If you look at different cohorts of users, then we probably capture more than 50% of users up to 35 years old in almost every single country we’re in, in Europe. We have difficulties capturing people aged 50, 60, or 70+, who still hold the majority of liquid assets. It’s very hard for them to move from a legacy bank to a digital bank. John Collison Sorry, what’s that statistic about 50% of under-35s? Nik Storonsky Basically, if you take all the countries in Europe and look at cohorts of people aged 18–25, 25–30, 30–35, and then older, in the majority of countries, we’ve already captured more than 50% of people up to 35 years old. John Collison Having any kind of Revolut account? Nik Storonsky Yeah. John Collison How is this product development engine different as a regulated business versus if you were just a normal tech company? Nik Storonsky In a normal tech company, it’s much easier to do. In banking, you need to go through many approval processes. The way we’re structured—because we have many banks—the approval process works as what we call NPAP, the New Product Approval Process. John Collison How do you minimize churn? Nik Storonsky By trying to build the best product. John Collison But more than that? Nik Storonsky More than that— John Collison Because again, you’re very quantitative, you’re very product-oriented. This is the thing that quantitative, product-oriented people obsess over. Nik Storonsky Yeah, we used to have this framework of a state machine. You’re probably familiar with it: how many people were onboarding, how many people went through from being P2P customers to salary customers, and how many of them churned. Then it just became too complex. We ended up just having a cohort of customers who joined per country, and then looking at how many of them are still with us within 12 months, 18 months, and 24 months. What we observe is that we have a “smile.” Out of 100 customers, maybe 60 are monthly active. But after 2 years, it will be 65 or 70 customers. People return to us. I would say we actually have negative churn. John Collison Why do people come back? Why do people leave but then come back? Nik Storonsky I think it’s because a larger and larger portion of the population started using Revolut. People who churned for different reasons still hear about it from friends and family, and then they come back. John Collison I see. You have multiple word-of-mouth shots on goal. Okay, so, yeah, I was curious to ask you about AI. How AI-pilled are you in how you run the company? Nik Storonsky I obviously started with AI about 2 years ago. The goal was just to optimize customer support and translation. Now it’s almost in every single area of the company, including engineering and marketing. We’re even trying to create an AI employee, end to end. Yes, we’re very involved. For the last 10 years, I’ve optimized a lot of things in the company based on people, on their advantages and disadvantages. We built all the systems for KPIs, roadmaps, processes, hiring, and performance management. Now it might all be redundant in 2–3 years’ time because of AI. We’re all reinventing how the company should work. John Collison How has it changed how you hire, either at an overall company level or at an individual team level? Should the 8-person teams now be 3-person teams? Can you have higher aspirations for what an 8-person team can accomplish? Nik Storonsky Technically, one person can accomplish much more now. I would even say you don’t really need to have separate Android and iOS developers. One frontend developer can do things. You can even have one developer covering frontend, backend, and possibly data science as well. So, you can have one person doing all aspects of the product. You should probably still have a designer, although it’s so much easier to design that one developer can do design as well. A team can probably be 2 people. John Collison You work in this relatively standardized way of product bets, where you put a small team on something to initially test it. Has the size of that initial product-bet team changed? And shouldn’t it change, if not? Nik Storonsky Not yet, to be honest with you. We’re still operating in the old framework. John Collison Isn’t that very old-fashioned of you? Nik Storonsky It’s pretty old-fashioned, yeah. But I just prefer to continue doing things that work, while experimenting with new things. When we have a proven track record that new things really work for us, we will start changing. John Collison That’s interesting. You think that a 4-person team cannot bring a new product to market, even with all the new productivity enabled by AI? Nik Storonsky No, a 4-person team definitely can. It’s just that all the processes within Revolut are still set up by specialization. You need to have an iOS developer. They have the system; they know how it operates. Then you need an Android developer, a backend developer, data science, and an Ops manager. It will be very hard to just hire one person who will get access to all the systems and then produce all the required code with AI. John Collison I see. So partly, it’s just that you need to reorient Revolut a bit. Nik Storonsky We need to change the process, yeah. John Collison How does this change the shape of the Revolut organization? Nik Storonsky Well, first of all, we’re just trying to automate a lot of things. Hopefully, when automation is done, we can start hiring fewer people. At the moment, I don’t think we’re at the stage when automation is done. John Collison You traditionally competed with legacy banks. People might go to their bank for FX, or they might use a Revolut multi-currency card. You had a lot of advantages: you had no tech debt, no retail branch presence to afford, and many other advantages versus traditional banks. You’re very successful. As you go to Brazil, you compete with Nubank. And as you go to Kazakhstan, I guess you compete with Kaspi? Is that their name? Nik Storonsky Yeah, there is a Kaspi. John Collison Kaspi, yeah. Nik Storonsky We’re not in Kazakhstan yet. John Collison Okay, but when you do, how is the world going to look different when you’re competing with neobanks rather than traditional incumbents? Nik Storonsky Well, obviously it’s more difficult. Ultimately, when we go into a country, the decision is a combination of how bad the banks are, because there’s less competition, what our unit economics per customer are, and how difficult it is to get a license. Obviously, if a country has a lot of digital banking competition, it’s difficult to get a license, and the unit economics aren’t great, we will not go there. Or we’ll try to deprioritize it. Then we try to prioritize markets where there are a lot of legacy banks, the unit economics are great, and hopefully it’s easy to get a license. John Collison Okay, so you look for markets with sleepy incumbents. Nik Storonsky Exactly, yeah. John Collison That’s a good market for Revolut. What predicts the unit economics of a market, other than how rich people in that market are? Nik Storonsky Well, it’s interchange legislation or laws, and legislation on credit rates as well. Generally, if inflation is high, then credit rates are even higher, and the margins are even higher. John Collison Isn’t it surprising, then, that you grew up in Europe, where both interchange rates and lending rates are regulated? Wouldn’t that be a bad market according to this rubric? Nik Storonsky Yes, a very bad market, yeah. John Collison Does the rubric miss something? Nik Storonsky I think it’s just because we started in Europe, where it is very hard. Out of 50 digital banks, probably 3 or 4 survived. We really survived in tough competition. But that means we’re more fit to compete in other markets. John Collison Let’s talk about the US market. The US has historically been very resistant to neobanks. Remember Simple? Nik Storonsky Yep. John Collison That was what, 2012, 2013? Nik Storonsky I think they were the earliest one, yeah. Even before Europe, yes. John Collison Yeah, around then. Various foreign neobanks have tried to enter the US market. The US is such a quick adopter of so many technologies, and it invents so many of them. Leaving aside Revolut for a second—we’ll come back to that—why is the US so slow to get neobanks? Nik Storonsky Well, I think historically it was a very tough regulator. The US regulator was one of the toughest. That’s number one. Number two, all these startups couldn’t really get a banking license, so they chose not to get one because it was difficult. Traditional tech companies don’t want to be regulated because it kills their business. As a result, they jumped into partnerships with legacy banks. It doesn’t really work because you’ve got tech, and then you’ve got compliance people in banks. It’s a different company. They don’t really match together. So the model was wrong. John Collison You think you have to be willing to own the stack end to end, including all the licenses. Nik Storonsky Including licenses— John Collison Which was tricky in the US because it was such a stern licensing regime. Nik Storonsky Yeah. Plus, the culture was: “Okay, you need to have tech separate from compliance.” John Collison You need to have tech separate— Nik Storonsky In reality, it’s one business. You also need to automate tech, automate compliance with tech, and so on. John Collison Yes. John Collison Why did we not see a version of Simple that worked? Simple tried to do the tech via partners. Why didn’t someone try to start a neobank that owned the licensing end-to-end in the US? Nik Storonsky I think it was very difficult to get a license. I know Square and Cash App have a banking license now. They’ve activated it, but it took them 4–5 years. John Collison Yeah. Nik Storonsky Times have changed, definitely, with the new administration. John Collison Is the current regulatory environment better in the US? Nik Storonsky The process is quicker, yes. Now you can get a license within a year. Before, it could take 4–5 years. John Collison And you guys have gotten that? You will get that? Nik Storonsky We received conditional approval. There are 2 more approvals that we need to receive. John Collison This is from the OCC? Nik Storonsky OCC, yes. John Collison Okay, very good. And so, you guys will be going big in the US soon, when you get the— Nik Storonsky Around next year, hopefully. John Collison —the rest of the licenses. What will need to change about the product to be successful in the US? Nik Storonsky Well, it definitely needs to be credit card-led. You’ve got a lot of benefits in the US from Amex and Chase. We’ll do the same, with a credit card-led proposition and a lot of benefits as well. John Collison Okay, so you want to go head-to-head with Amex Platinum and Chase Sapphire? Nik Storonsky Yeah. John Collison How will you compete? Nik Storonsky By offering the same benefits or better, plus our whole proposition. They’re offering just payments products. We’re offering wealth, crypto trading, and so on. John Collison Why launch your own euro stablecoin? Nik Storonsky It’s good business, obviously. That’s number 1. Number 2 is that there’s a USD stablecoin, but there’s no equivalent—or credible equivalent—for euros in Europe. We should do it. John Collison Yes. You said you’ve been doing this for a very long time. It’s been multiple years? Nik Storonsky Yeah, the tech was built a long time ago. John Collison How do you organize your day? Are you waking up and going wherever your curiosity takes you, or is it hyper-scheduled? Nik Storonsky Monday to Friday, it’s hyper-scheduled, in 15- or 30-minute slots. Usually it’s business reviews, product reviews, and one-on-ones. Saturdays and Sundays are more freelancing and free thinking. John Collison Revolut’s the kind of company that has a work-from-home policy where you can work from home 2 days a week: Saturday and Sunday. Nik Storonsky Yes, true. I try to limit our external meetings as much as possible and spend 95% of my time internally. John Collison Do you think most CEOs are too externally facing in how they spend their time, going to conferences and all this kind of stuff? Nik Storonsky 100%. I do have an allocation for conferences, maybe 2–3 times a year, but that’s it. John Collison Yeah. You just want to be within the building, reviewing the actual product? Nik Storonsky Exactly. Products and business processes. John Collison What are you actually reviewing? Are you looking at metrics dashboards with people? And what are you, Nik, adding? You could also have an automated system that shuts down any product that’s failing to meet its revenue goals. Nik Storonsky Basically, we have all these KPIs, roadmaps, and processes targeting execution. Before, I was doing it manually. Now it’s all semi-automated, with the performance team also reviewing everything: whether the KPIs are correct and whether the roadmap is being executed for each team, department, and at the company level. What I do is product: product direction, product features, and detecting bullshit as well. There can be a lot of cases when everything is rosy, KPIs are good, and everything is met. But things can be even better. Then I just know it. John Collison What is the bullshit that you’re detecting if the KPIs look good? In what way are they trying to bamboozle you? Nik Storonsky You need to dive deeper than KPIs. A KPI can be met because of external factors and because of luck. Then you dive deep and look at the product, product features, and speed of development as well. I’ll give you an example. Our wealth and trading product grew 60–80% year-on-year 2 or 3 years ago. Then I thought it wasn’t enough. It should have been around 300%. I dived deep, and what I realized was that the quality of the product wasn’t great. The features weren’t good. Then we changed the team, and now it’s growing 300%. You need to have intuition for these things. John Collison What’s the easiest way to annoy you in a product review? Nik Storonsky Incompetence. John Collison What kind of incompetence? There are many forms. Nik Storonsky We have certain standards for quality. Everyone knows these standards. If somehow I see a product below the standard of quality, and we’ve done many products so far, then it really annoys me. John Collison Okay, so shoddy product quality is the criteria— Nik Storonsky Yeah, that we’re going into the same mistakes. John Collison Yes. How’s your AI hedge fund going? Nik Storonsky It’s actually going well. In terms of returns, it’s now in the top 3% or 4% of funds in the world. The model really works. John Collison What is the model? Nik Storonsky Our model is a machine learning model. It’s trained on a lot of data on startups. It’s a feature-based model. Based on our number of features, it tells you which startups to invest in. John Collison It’s not a hedge fund, it’s a venture firm. Nik Storonsky It’s a venture firm. John Collison It’s an AI venture firm. Okay. Nik Storonsky They’ve already invested in 40–50 deals in the last 2–3 years, and the returns are good. John Collison Isn’t the classic problem with this kind of approach that, with private company investing, it’s about picking the right companies and then being able to invest in them? Nik Storonsky Exactly. John Collison Sometimes it’s very obviously good companies, but you just can’t invest in them. Nik Storonsky Yeah. John Collison How does that work here? Nik Storonsky As you correctly noticed, the first part is to create a good model that will tell you with high precision which startups to invest in and which not to. Then, second, to enter the deal. Our sales proposition to founders is that, first, we will help them with Revolut’s operational playbooks. We tell them exactly how Revolut hires people, how performance management works, and so on, so they don’t reinvent things from scratch. Second, I help with my personal advice. Third, we help them sell either into Revolut or to Revolut’s customers as well. John Collison I see. So, you’re a desirable investor and— Nik Storonsky So, an added-value investor. Exactly. You can trade the added value for that. Nik Storonsky When’s Revolut going public? Nik Storonsky Well, I hope in 2028. It’s now 2026, so in 2 years’ time, subject to the market being good. John Collison What needs to be true for everything else to be ready, or is it just already ready? Nik Storonsky It’s still a work in progress. We need to launch in the US. We need to launch in a lot of new expansion markets. We still need to prove that we can be as successful in Europe in markets outside of Europe, especially credit-led markets. John Collison Do you actually need to launch in the US before going public? Isn’t Revolut a huge bank already, with billions of dollars in profit? You’re plenty scaled already. Nik Storonsky No, of course. It’s not necessary, but it’s good to have. John Collison Because investors are based in the United States? Again, this home-country bias means they’ll be more interested in Revolut if they’re familiar with the product? Nik Storonsky I’m not really optimizing for valuation or readiness for an IPO. It’s more: “Okay, this is the roadmap that we want to complete. Let’s focus on the roadmap.” John Collison You mentioned helping startups understand the Revolut playbooks. Where do you think the Revolut playbook is most differentiated? You talked about performance management and a few other things. Nik Storonsky Obviously, hiring, performance management, and product building as well. I think with AI, it might be irrelevant in the next 2–3 years. John Collison How do you do performance management differently? Nik Storonsky I think it’s very important to do it quarterly. The majority of companies do it once a year, and I think that’s too long. The problem is a lot of managers are inherently biased against exiting underperformers. John Collison Mm-hmm. Nik Storonsky By having a process once a year, you’re not really helping the company. Then you’re forcing managers to make performance-based exits once a year. In reality, you need to do it as fast as possible. You can’t really do performance management once every month, because it’s too time-consuming. But you can do it once every quarter. John Collison Do you try to make performance more quantitative than other companies? Mapping products to where they should be on the cohort curve is maybe one example of that. Do you try to do that in other places? Nik Storonsky Yeah, we’re trying to be as quantitative as possible. Every person is assessed on their skills and deliverables. Deliverables are measured by the roadmap and KPIs, and then there’s culture. All these 3 aspects are assessed by the manager, plus the functional manager. There’s also a performance review on top of it, checking that everything is correct, and then a person is assessed. Some domains are just fundamentally more quantifiable than others. A salesperson—you can measure how much they sold. John Collison Whereas a lawyer, you can only make that so quantifiable, right? Nik Storonsky Well, in our case, we have metrics for almost every lawyer, I think. Definitely for the team of lawyers. If you look at commercial lawyers, for example, they process contracts. Are they meeting their SLAs? That’s the number one metric. How many deficiencies are in the contracts? Again, you can measure it, and so on. On the team level, we definitely have KPIs. On an individual level, I’m not sure, but it’s possible to build them. John Collison I don’t think most companies really believe you can measure lawyers on a grid of KPIs. Do you think, again, that you can be more quantitative than you think? Nik Storonsky You can definitely be more quantitative than the majority of companies, I think. Can you quantify everything? No. You need to have some other leading indicators rather than KPIs. John Collison Okay, we’ll leave it there. Thank you, Nik. Nik Storonsky Thank you.