Revolut launches personal loans in the UK

The digital bank is entering a market dominated by giants such as NatWest, Lloyds and Barclays with unsecured lending

Revolut, regarded as Europe’s most valuable startup, has begun offering unsecured personal loans in the UK, the company’s UK chief executive Francesca Carlesi told Reuters. With this move, Revolut is entering the lucrative consumer lending market controlled by the country’s biggest banks.

The step takes Revolut beyond its core payments and subscription products into riskier territory. The bank aims to compete more directly with NatWest, Lloyds, Barclays, Santander’s UK business and HSBC.

“We want to go from being a very successful everyday spending app to disrupting the market and becoming the primary bank of choice for everyone in the United Kingdom,” Carlesi said.

According to a Revolut spokesperson, loans will range from £2,000 to £25,000, with interest rates between 6.9% and 29.3%.

Carlesi said the bank will take a cautious approach at first: loans will be offered to a selected group of customers and then extended to its 14 million UK customers in the coming months. No specific overall lending target has been set for the UK.

The company will also launch a credit card in the near future. This is part of broader efforts to increase revenue per customer, a measure on which Revolut still lags behind traditional banks.

Unlike traditional banks, Revolut does not have decades of customer spending and payment history. Carlesi said the bank has supplemented its underwriting (credit risk assessment) with data from external providers and is confident in its credit analysis.

She said Revolut will ultimately seek to offload much of its risk through the sale of securities, and aims to keep its loan-to-deposit ratio at around 6%, well below that of other banks. The bank also plans to eventually enter the highly competitive UK mortgage market.

Founded in 2015 by Nik Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko, London-based Revolut serves more than 80 million customers worldwide. Its private valuation stands at $115 billion, exceeding that of listed rivals such as Barclays and NatWest.

Even so, the bank still trails its rivals significantly in revenue per customer. The share of customers who use Revolut as their main bank account and receive their salary into it is also low. This raises questions about whether it can sustain its rapid growth.

Revolut’s rapid rise has also drawn regulatory and operational scrutiny. In 2025, the Bank of Lithuania imposed a record fine of €3.5 million on the bank for shortcomings in its transaction monitoring controls. This month, Revolut was among the financial firms affected by a Google Cloud outage that lasted several hours.

The lending initiative comes as the cost of living in the UK has become harder to bear amid a weakening labour market and rising inflation. These factors could affect borrowers’ ability to meet their obligations.