Revolut

Europe’s financial innovators are arriving in the US from more than one direction.

After moving to Spain from Los Angeles in January of last year, I quickly realized that much of the innovation in finance is happening in Europe. Meaning the seismic shifts in how consumers manage and spend money in their day-to-day lives.  

U.K.-based fintech Revolut filed for a U.S. bank charter with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. recently and expects to establish a banking presence there next year, complete with high-yield savings and checking accounts; access to stablecoins, multi-currency deposits; trading in stocks and crypto; and access to ATM networks (no physical branches). 

But as much as JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon seems to—all at once—love, respect, and envy Revolut, I’m not so sure the banking and fintech establishments are quite ready for the neobank’s full-scale entry into the U.S.

Enter Santander

As much as I believe Revolut — not to mention bunq — are building the future of finance in the U.S. from Europe, another, less-discussed name could present a significant challenge. Put another way: You can’t talk about neobanks upending personal finance in the U.S. without bringing Banco Santander SA into the conversation. 

Fintechs alone may not be the most meaningful competitive challenge to U.S. banks, in other words. 

Understanding why starts with one of the first questions Revolut skeptics and banking incumbents around the world love to float: Can a company become a primary financial relationship without being a major loan underwriter?

It’s difficult for a fintech to build a lending business, Felipe Peñacoba Martinez, CEO of Getnet Platforms Payments Hub (a Santander company) and former CIO at Revolut Bank (EU), told Global Finance. “Revolut is aware this takes time,” he said, “and they’re going slower than in other areas.” 

Despite serving tens of millions of customers globally and holding roughly $67 billion in customer balances, Revolut’s loan book remains a fraction of that figure. Then again, its consumer lending business is also growing rapidly: up 120% year over year to $2.9 billion, according to the company’s 2025 report. 

By banking standards, Revolut’s loan-to-deposit ratio remains small, but its lending segment is no longer theoretical. What matters is whether fintechs can scale banking capabilities faster than banks can scale digital ecosystems.

Peñacoba Martinez points to his own children, all three of whom use Revolut and don’t have a need the company can’t serve. “Big banks are seeing how neobanks are taking market share, especially among younger generations,” he says, and as these users eventually seek mortgages and more complex investment products, Revolut wants to serve those needs.   

At day’s end, lending conveniently trotted out as a competitive obstacle is the kind of question keepers of the status quo ask when confronted with disruptive business models. Radio people dismissed streaming. Early Amazon.com Inc. skeptics pointed to the online retailer’s lack of profitability. Blockbuster Video scoffed at a $50 million offer to buy Netflix Inc. History is full of established players evaluating the future through the lens of the present.

The lending question becomes more useful as a lens than a verdict. Is it easier for fintechs to build the lending, deposits, and infrastructure traditionally associated with banks? Or is it easier for banks to build the customer experiences, payment capabilities, and digital ecosystems that make fintechs disruptive?

The Openbank Advantage

Santander’s advantage goes beyond its balance sheet. Through Openbank, Getnet, and its broader technology transformation efforts, the bank appears to be assembling many of the same capabilities fintechs spent years developing from scratch and combining them with infrastructure that many challengers still outsource or access through partners. 

Traditional banks realize the threat from fintechs like Revolut and need to act, said Peñacoba Martinez, but the challenge lies in execution.

“We all know we need to build a modern tech stack that’s easy to integrate, but how do you do that?” he added. “Building is easy, but decades of history, legacy systems, and mindsets are the hard part. It’s very complex for incumbents due to time. Every year that passes, the situation is worse. The risk of breaking something is a greater challenge for big banks than for fintechs.”

Inside Santander, the approach has been to prove new systems internally before scaling them more broadly. As Peñacoba Martinez described it, the challenge isn’t simply building something new; it’s continuing to improve it after launch. Payments became the first testing ground at Santander, with roughly 70% of group payments now running through Getnet.

The same logic applies to Openbank. Santander Executive Chair Ana Botín has made clear that she wants the platform to reach tens of millions of accounts in the coming years as “a digital bank with branches,” including in the U.S.

When I asked Peñacoba Martinez if these efforts effectively place Santander in direct competition with Revolut, his answer was straightforward: yes.

For all the attention paid to Revolut’s 2027 full-scale launch in the U.S., one of the more consequential battles may involve two companies moving toward similar destinations from opposite directions.  

Lifestyle Brands vs. Global Banks

One is a fintech building bank capabilities but marketing itself as a lifestyle brand; the other, a global bank adopting the mindset of a fintech while leveraging advantages fintechs have yet to replicate. The lesson for incumbents in the U.S. and around the world: neither of these models exists in isolation. 

Revolut, Santander, bunq, Nubank, and others are part of a broader wave of foreign challengers attempting to capture market share in the world’s most lucrative banking market. 

Having helped build products inside Revolut and now helping modernize a global banking group, Peñacoba Martinez has seen both journeys firsthand. Listening to him describe them, one conclusion becomes difficult to ignore: time tends to help one side and hurt the other. 

Like a young athlete, fintechs have room to grow aggressively from scratch; they don’t think about limits. For older players, every year increases the pressure to keep up without breaking what they have already established.

There’s no question that the competitive threat to U.S. finance from abroad is real. What remains murky is whether U.S. banks truly appreciate how many directions it’s coming from. 

Rocco Pendola is a contributing correspondent based in Spain.

An acquisition is the easiest way for the titan to get a leg up with digital nomads and international customers.

At first glance, it seems an absurd idea: JPMorgan Chase & Co., with its roughly $850 billion market cap, acquiring European unicorn Revolut, a private neobank valued at $75 billion.

Seemingly absurd, yes, but also worth considering, because it underscores the challenge that upstart fintechs pose to traditional banks. JPMorgan has already tested the practicality of building a digital-first banking experience internally. It launched Finn in 2017 as a standalone mobile banking brand aimed at younger users, then shut it down in 2019 after it failed to gain traction.

But the Finn experiment was not a clean rebuttal; it looked more like a legacy institution’s attempt to market around a shifting banking relationship than a fundamental rethink. A Revolut acquisition would give JPMorgan an established entry point into a dynamic new field.

I’m old enough to remember when BlackBerry’s CEO scoffed at Steve Jobs, saying, “You don’t need an app for the web.” We know how that played out. It’s easy to dismiss what doesn’t seem to fit your current moment, and just as easy to miss the next shift when you have the means to act.

JPMorgan doesn’t need Revolut. But the point isn’t survival; it’s trajectory. If banking is moving toward super apps as primary accounts, the question is whether JPMorgan can realistically build that future internally, or whether buying it may be the faster path.

Here are four reasons it could actually make sense:

1. The Technology

Ask a senior engineer at Revolut whether JPMorgan could replicate its platform quickly, and you’re likely to get a laugh. Ask JPMorgan’s technology leadership, and you’re likely to hear the opposite.

Both can be true.

By the time JPMorgan was experimenting with the future, Revolut was writing it. The fintech hit 100,000 customers within a year of its funding and scaled to 50 million by the end of 2024. It’s redefining what consumers expect from banking in Europe, and its sights are now set on the U.S. as well. In March, it applied to the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for a U.S. national bank charter.

2. The Culture

JPMorgan has the resources to succeed in the era of super-apps. But building a globally integrated, mobile-first platform is as much about organizational culture as it is about technology. Revolut was built for speed, iteration, and cross-border functionality from day one. JPMorgan was built for scale, stability, and regulatory complexity.

As Finn illustrates, those traits are not easily interchangeable.

JPMorgan could buy smaller firms in payments, investing, foreign exchange, or onboarding to assemble its own version of a super app. But stitching together components is not the same as acquiring a scaled, integrated platform with tens of millions of users, unified technology, and talent that lives and breathes a culture built around speed and innovation.

Realistically, an acquisition would require a significant premium over Revolut’s most recent private valuation. But that cuts both ways; JPMorgan would be paying for a scaled operating system, not a collection of disconnected parts.

3. The Geography

The difference between the two banks shows up in their approach to competing in Europe. JPMorgan is already expanding its digital retail presence and building out its footprint beyond the U.S. But the approach is incremental.

Revolut is anything but incremental. The company has grown to more than 70 million customers, adding roughly 1 million every 17 days. It provides immediate scale in markets where JPMorgan is still building.

Banks like Banco Santander have spent decades building global retail networks, market by market. For JPMorgan, acquiring Revolut would dramatically shorten that timeline, turning a multi-year expansion into near-instant relevance.

4. The Demographics

Traditional banking still assumes a static customer: one address, one jurisdiction, one primary market. While that remains true for many customers, it doesn’t justify treating digital nomads and international customers as undeserving, which is exactly what many U.S. banks do.

A growing segment — freelancers, remote workers, and globally mobile professionals — lives across borders. They earn in one currency, spend in another, and expect their financial lives to follow them. Revolut was built specifically for this customer.

JPMorgan, for all its scale, still largely adheres to a domestic model. Acquiring Revolut would instantly position it at the center of a shift already underway: one that legacy banking structures are not designed to support.

Regulatory Hurdles

Of course, a deal this large would face serious scrutiny in the U.S. and the U.K. Regulators would question systemic risk, governance, the impact on competition, and whether one of the world’s largest banks should absorb one of fintech’s fastest-growing global challengers.

But “difficult” and “impossible” are not synonyms, especially in modern finance, where every few years brings a deal that once seemed unthinkable. If JPMorgan believed the strategic gap was large enough, regulatory friction would become part of the negotiation, not the automatic death of the deal.  

It would also send a signal to regulators and policymakers — intentionally or not — that U.S. banking structures may need to loosen if domestic institutions are to compete more effectively on the global stage. Even floating a deal like a JPMorgan/Revolut tie-up would force a conversation the industry needs to have.

No, JPMorgan doesn’t need Revolut. But at some point, it may have to decide whether to write the future of banking or keep refining the version it already dominates.