Revolut has begun pitching its business banking services to FTSE 250 companies, moving to win corporate clients from Britain's largest lenders, according to a Financial Times report published on Wednesday. The push targets NatWest, Lloyds, HSBC and Barclays, the four established banks that dominate UK corporate relationships. Revolut Business generated £708 million of revenue in 2025, an increase of 53% on the previous year, and serves approximately 800,000 clients. The division is aiming for 1 million business customers globally by 2027. To accelerate acquisition, Revolut is paying employees £1,000, about $1,355, for each business customer they refer.
The move follows a regulatory milestone in March, when the Prudential Regulation Authority lifted the restrictions attached to Revolut's UK banking licence. That concluded a process which began with an application in 2021 and passed through a period of restricted authorisation from July 2024. Full authorisation gives Revolut the capacity to hold deposits without mobilisation constraints and to build a lending book, the product set that larger corporate clients expect alongside payments and cash management. Until that point, credit was the conspicuous gap in a proposition otherwise built around current accounts, payment services and corporate debit cards.
FROM SMALL BUSINESSES TO LISTED MID-CAPS
Revolut Business has established itself among companies with five to 50 employees but has yet to build a meaningful position among larger corporate clients, division head James Gibson told the FT. Booking.com and the fitness company Barry's Bootcamp are among the clients named in the report. Moving into listed mid-cap companies would give the division access to larger deposit balances, heavier payment flows and borrowing requirements that carry materially different economics from small-business accounts. Gibson has led the unit since Revolut established it in 2017.
The division's scale within the wider group remains modest relative to the ambition. Revolut Business accounted for about 16% of the group's £4.5 billion in 2025 revenue, with transaction volume of £277 billion, up 56% on 2024, according to Revolut's annual report. Gibson told the FT that business banking can produce half or more of a bank's revenue, although reporting structures differ across lenders. Revolut has reached 75 million customers across 40 countries, and Gibson said founder and chief executive Nik Storonsky views corporate banking as a growth opportunity.
CREDIT CAPACITY REMAINS THE CONSTRAINT
Revolut is approaching lending cautiously and hiring from banks with established corporate operations. "You can't just go 'bang' . . . you've got to have credit underwriting models," Gibson said. No timetable has been set for corporate lending, and the company has not identified any FTSE 250 prospects. Total assets stood at £43 billion at the end of 2025, a balance sheet far smaller than those of the four incumbents it has identified as its principal UK rivals. Corporate clients also add underwriting, approval and servicing requirements absent from a payments-only relationship.
The strategy separates Revolut from Britain's other digital banks, which built their business propositions around smaller firms. Monzo introduced Business Lite and Business Pro in March 2020 for sole traders and limited companies, reaching more than 380,000 business clients by early 2024, while Starling launched its mobile business account in March 2018 and reported 155,000 business accounts and a 2.6% share of UK SME banking by May 2020. Selling to FTSE 250 groups requires treasury services and relationship coverage at a different scale. Revolut has not disclosed how many of the 200,000 additional customers needed to hit its 2027 target are expected to be larger companies, leaving the pace of corporate lending build-out as the measure to watch.