Inside Revolut’s troubled India foray

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Editor's note: Recent months have been tough for Revolut’s Russian-born British co-founder and chief executive Nikolay Storonsky. Russia’s war with Ukraine has created geopolitical hurdles for the London-based fintech startup, even as venture capital funding has dried up for technology companies across the world.  Storonsky—a former derivatives trader at Credit Suisse and Lehman Brothers—and his team has been hard at work engaging with regulators and governments across the world for digital banking licences. In an interview to Bloomberg TV last week, Storonsky identified India along with Latin America and the Philippines as geographies where Revolut has been “aggressively expanding” in recent months. Only in July last year, Revolut raised an $800 million round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Tiger Global, valuing it at $33 billion; firmly establishing its credentials as one of Europe’s most valued privately held fintechs alongside Irish-American payments startup Stripe and Sweden’s buy now pay later giant Klarna.  Since its launch in 2015 in the UK as a prepaid card offering cheap foreign-exchange fees, the scale-up of Revolut has been nothing short of remarkable. The neobanking startup …