Revolut received a full French banking license on Monday, its second bank inside the European Union. The European Central Bank’s Governing Council adopted the decision after a joint assessment with France’s Autorite de Controle Prudentiel et de Resolution, the company said.
Revolut Bank S.A. will start with customers in France, then Germany, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain in later phases. The Lithuanian entity, Revolut Bank UAB, keeps the rest of the European Economic Area under the dual-hub structure the company set out in 2025.
For retail brokers, the license lands on a competitor that already sells trading. Revolut runs CFD trading in 29 countries alongside stocks, ETFs and crypto, and says it has more than 75 million customers worldwide.
Two Banks, One Supervisor
Both entities answer to the ECB and to their national regulator. Frederic Oudea, who ran Societe Generale for 15 years, chairs the French board, and Beatrice Cossa-Dumurgier is chief executive for Western Europe.
“Our focus now turns to execution,” Cossa-Dumurgier said in the announcement. Revolut said the French base lets it tailor products to each market.
The ECB Has Already Restricted Revolut’s Other EU Bank
Supervisors have not been uniformly permissive. The ECB told Revolut’s European board in July 2025 to stop launching new products across the European Economic Area, the Financial Times reported, after finding weaknesses in how the company approved them.
The restrictions also covered acquisitions and onboarding customers outside Europe, according to that reporting. Regulators told the company to commission an independent review of its risk, compliance and legal functions.
Bloomberg reported on July 21 that the French entity was likely to open with similar limits on new products.
Monday’s announcement did not say whether any of the measures have been lifted, and Finance Magnates could not establish it. Revolut has said it is in “continuous and constructive dialogue with our regulators,” and the ECB declined to comment when the restrictions were first reported.
Few Digital Banks Run Two EU Licenses
Holding two licensed banks inside the EU is rare among digital challengers, which have generally passported out of one home regulator. Revolut itself served the EEA off the Lithuanian license from 2018 until Monday.
Trade Republic works from one German license, which the ECB granted in December 2023. N26 covers its European markets from Germany as well.
bunq passed 20 million users on a Dutch license, well short of Revolut’s global count.
A Pledge That Grew and Widened
Revolut said it has committed more than EUR 1 billion (about $1.16 billion) across Western Europe, is hiring more than 600 people in the region, and will open the Paris headquarters in 2027.
Those figures have moved. Revolut said at the Choose France summit in May 2025 that it would invest EUR 1 billion in France and hire at least 200 people there within three years.
Monday’s numbers cover the whole region, not France alone, so the two sets do not compare directly. Revolut did not break out a French figure.
The company says about 30 million customers in Western Europe use it, close to 8 million of them added over the past year. It did not publish the deposit base behind that number.
Revolut filed its French application with the ACPR in July 2025. Cossa-Dumurgier told Reuters in April that talks were advanced but would not commit to a date, and the company has said it will not list publicly before 2028.
The license reflects “the constructive engagement we’ve built with the French and European authorities,” Oudea said.
This article was written by Damian Chmiel at www.financemagnates.com.
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