Revolut reports first annual profit for 2021

Revenues tripled from £220m in 2020 to £636m in 2021, and gross margin increased from 33% to 70%, for the UK fintech’s financial year ending 31 December 2021

Revolut has earned £26.3m in profit in its first full year of profitability. 

Revenues tripled from £220m in 2020 to £636m in 2021, and gross margin increased from 33% to 70%, for the UK fintech’s financial year ending 31 December 2021. 

The positive results, due to growth in active retail customers and increased revenue across its products, came amid a delay in publication of the 2021 accounts. 

Commenting on reaching profitability, Nik Storonsky, chief executive officer of Revolut, said: “We have achieved our first full year of profit and shown that we can accelerate customer growth, at scale, and grow revenue across all of our product lines.”  

Martin Gilbert, chairman of Revolut, added: “This strong financial performance shows Revolut has efficiently moved from the ‘start-up’ business that is only focused on growth, to the ‘scale-up’ looking to grow profitably.” 

Revolut was granted a full European banking licence in 2021 and launched in 12 new countries in 2022, taking the number of European countries where it operates as a fully-fledged digital bank to 30. 

However, the fintech super app, which operates across the consumer and business payments, wealth and trading markets, it is yet to receive a UK banking licence. Revolut executives are suggesting that this could be close. 

Revolut also reported continued progress in 2022, with revenues increasing more than 30% to over £850m. 

Commenting on performance in 2022, chief financial officer, Mikko Salovaara said: “Revenue has grown considerably compared to FY2021, with particularly strong growth in payments, as we welcomed millions of new customers and more people chose to travel again.  

“During 2022 we continued to focus on growth and really ramped up marketing and sales efforts for the retail and business ecosystems respectively.  

“Our investment has seen a real return, with customer growth accelerating in 2022 as we added more than 9m new customers last year, an increase of 54%.” 

Revolut now has more than 27m retail customers, including 6m in the UK. It also doubled its number of employees in 2022 to 6,000.  

In 2023, Revolut plans to launch several new products and expand into new markets, including New Zealand, Brazil and India. 

Image: Revolut 

Josh Poyser Josh Poyser is an editor at FinTech Intel. He has written about fintech for several years and appeared at FinTech Connect 2023 on the 'Unlocking Success: The Art of Fintech PR' panel.