Revolut, the London-headquartered global financial super-app with more than 75 million users worldwide, has obtained a full Authorised Deposit-taking Institution (ADI) licence from the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) — a landmark approval that redraws the competitive map of Australian retail banking and represents the firm's first fully licensed banking entity across the Asia-Pacific region. Operating henceforth as Revolut Bank Australia, the company is no longer a fintech operating at the margins of the formal banking system. It is, structurally and legally, a bank — one with a pre-existing customer footprint of over one million retail and commercial accounts and the backing of a global revenue engine that no domestic challenger has yet matched.
From Stored-Value Platform to Prudentially Supervised Bank
Before APRA granted this approval, Revolut's Australian operations were anchored by an Australian Financial Services Licence (AFSL) and an Australian Credit Licence — a configuration that permitted multi-currency wallets, stock trading, and payments but barred the company from offering government-backed deposit protection or originating lending products from its own balance sheet. That constraint is now lifted. Under the Banking Act 1959, Revolut Bank Australia becomes a full participant in Australia's deposit insurance architecture: customer funds up to AUD 250,000 are now protected under the Financial Claims Scheme (FCS), placing Revolut on equal regulatory footing with the country's incumbent retail banks.
The product implications are immediate and significant. Revolut Bank Australia is rolling out instant-access savings accounts offering up to 5.05% per annum for top-tier retail customers and 4.25% per annum for business users — rates that position it squarely against the yield offerings of the established majors. Alongside savings, the bank is launching in-house credit card products with limits ranging from $1,000 to $35,000, distributed entirely within the Revolut app ecosystem rather than through third-party brokers. All existing Australian users — more than one million accounts — will be automatically migrated into the new banking structure, while all new sign-ups will be onboarded directly into the licensed bank from day one.
What the Founders Are Saying
Nik Storonsky, Revolut's founder and chief executive officer, framed the achievement in competitive terms. Securing a banking licence in a market as highly regulated and demanding as Australia, he noted, is a direct validation of the company's business model and its capacity to satisfy rigorous prudential requirements. Matt Baxby, chief executive of Revolut Bank Australia, was more expansive about the strategic horizon: the ADI approval, he said, enables the rollout of a broader suite of products — including savings and credit — and serves as the launchpad for Revolut's next chapter across the Asia-Pacific region. Together, the statements signal that Australia is not a standalone objective but a regulatory beachhead for wider regional ambitions.
Graveyard of Ambitions: Why Earlier Neobanks Failed Here
Revolut's entry into full-service Australian banking arrives against a sobering backdrop. The first wave of domestic neobanks — most notably Volt and Xinja — collapsed or retreated under the weight of unsustainable unit economics and chronic difficulties retaining deposits at meaningful scale. Their failure was instructive: without diversified revenue streams, a local neobank burning cash on customer acquisition in a market dominated by deeply entrenched incumbents had no viable path to profitability.
Revolut's structural position is materially different in three respects. First, it enters the ADI regime with over one million active local accounts already on its books, dramatically compressing the customer acquisition cost burden that crippled earlier entrants. Second, its global user base of 75 million users generates revenue across foreign exchange, cryptocurrency fees, subscription tiers, and interchange — streams that subsidise regional expansion and provide a financial cushion unavailable to standalone local challengers. Third, ADI status grants Revolut direct access to Australian payment rails including the New Payments Platform (NPP), eliminating the intermediary agency banking costs that erode margins for non-bank payment providers. On each of these dimensions, the comparison with Volt and Xinja is not merely favourable — it is categorical.
Prudential Obligations: The Weight of Full Supervision
ADI status is not a commercial prize without attendant obligations. APRA's prudential framework is among the most demanding in the Asia-Pacific region, and Revolut Bank Australia is now subject to its full rigour. This includes compliance with CPS 230, APRA's Operational Risk Management standard, which imposes exacting requirements around third-party risk — covering cloud infrastructure providers and core processing partners — as well as capital adequacy and liquidity controls calibrated against the bank's emerging loan book exposure. Separately, the bank falls under the jurisdiction of AUSTRAC, Australia's financial intelligence and anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism financing (CTF) regulator, requiring robust identity verification, continuous transaction monitoring, and vulnerability reporting across cross-border payment corridors.
For risk officers and compliance executives observing from the United Kingdom, Europe, or the United States, the sequence of events in Australia carries a clear message: the window for large-scale fintech operations to sustain themselves on e-money frameworks or agency-banking arrangements is narrowing rapidly. Regulators across mature markets — whether APRA in Sydney, the Financial Conduct Authority and Prudential Regulation Authority in London, or the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Federal Reserve in Washington — are increasingly treating high-volume stored-value platforms as latent systemic risks, and the regulatory trajectory in each jurisdiction points in the same direction.
What This Means for the Broader Market
Revolut's ADI approval is more than a bilateral story between a fintech and a regulator. It marks a structural inflection point in how global financial technology companies engage with mature, tightly regulated banking markets. The era in which a payments licence could serve as a durable proxy for banking — capturing the upside of customer relationships without the capital and compliance burden of full prudential supervision — is giving way to a more demanding paradigm. Platforms that aspire to offer the full suite of financial services at scale must increasingly accept the weight of deposit insurance obligations, capital buffers, and operational risk frameworks that incumbent banks have carried for decades. Revolut, with one million existing customers and a global balance sheet behind it, has made that transition in Australia. Its competitors, domestic and international alike, are now on notice.
Written by the editorial team — independent journalism powered by Codego Press.
