The LSE Directory / CFD and forex brokers
Revolut is a London-headquartered financial technology company, founded in 2015, that runs a mobile-first current account and multi-currency card alongside a broader suite of financial products inside a single app. Core banking features include current accounts, debit cards, budgeting tools and real-time foreign exchange across more than 25 currencies with transfers to 160-plus countries. A separate "Wealth" section of the app adds stock and ETF trading, cryptocurrency buying and staking, commodities exposure, and CFD trading, while a separate Revolut Business product offers multi-currency corporate accounts, payroll and merchant acquiring for companies. Within CFD trading specifically, Revolut differs from single-purpose brokers by distributing leveraged trading from inside its everyday banking app rather than a standalone platform. Brokerage services run on Revolut Invest, operated through its Lithuania-regulated subsidiary Revolut Securities Europe UAB, a Category A investment firm under MiFID II since November 2021. The product covers CFDs on stocks, indices, commodities and forex across more than a hundred underlying markets, with standard retail leverage caps of roughly 1:5 on individual stocks, 1:10 on most commodities, and 1:20 on gold and major indices, alongside the mandated retail-loss risk warning. Because CFD access sits behind an account tens of millions of people already hold for everyday banking, Revolut's trading customer acquisition model differs structurally from dedicated CFD and forex brokers such as IG, eToro or Trading 212, which build their customer base directly around trading rather than cross-selling from a banking product. Revolut was founded on 1 July 2015 by Nik Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko. The company reported around 68.3 million retail customers at the end of 2025 and full-year 2025 revenue of about $6 billion, up from $4 billion in 2024, with net profit of about $1.7 billion. A November 2025 secondary share sale valued the company at $75 billion, up from $45 billion in 2024, against roughly $5.89 billion raised in funding to that point. Separately from its CFD business, Revolut holds a Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) license from Cyprus's CySEC, issued in October 2025, covering crypto services across the European Economic Area. In March 2026, Revolut received a full UK banking licence from the Prudential Regulation Authority, ending a roughly three-year application process and adding to the e-money permissions and EU banking licence (held via Lithuania since 2021) it had operated under previously; that same month it applied for a US banking charter with the OCC and FDIC. Chief executive Nik Storonsky said in April 2026 that an eventual IPO, targeting a valuation in the $150 billion to $200 billion range, was roughly two years away.
