Revolut launches personal loans in UK in challenge to major banks

Digital bank Revolut has begun offering unsecured personal loans in Britain, its UK chief executive Francesca Carlesi told Reuters, taking the company into a 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, Reuters reports.

“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.

Founded in 2015 by chief executive 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 such as Barclays and NatWest, Reuters reports.

Revolut already offers unsecured loans in some other countries, and Britain is one of its biggest markets. Carlesi said the company 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, and it eventually plans to enter the mortgage market in Britain.

The 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, Reuters reports.

Sources

• Reuters: “Revolut launches personal loans in UK, taking on major banks” — https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/revolut-launches-personal-loans-uk-taking-major-banks-2026-10-26/