By David Tirado, Chief Commercial Executive, Revolut
The typical trajectory of a successful startup is as predictable as it is perilous. A company identifies a single pain point, builds a brilliant solution, scales rapidly, and eventually, burdened by its own mass, slows down. In the financial sector, this scale-up stagnation is usually where innovation goes to die, replaced by the cautious, incremental creeping of legacy banking.
In March, Revolut reported a pre-tax profit of £1.7 billion and revenues of £4.5 billion for 2025. While the sheer scale of those numbers can’t be overlooked, the more significant story lies in how they were achieved. We haven’t just built a profitable bank; we have built a repeatable engine for diversification that defies the gravitational pull of corporate bureaucracy.
At the heart of this is what we call our New Bets framework.
The internal Venture Capitalist
In most large institutions, a new idea must survive a gauntlet of committees, often losing its edge – or its budget – before it ever reaches a customer. We chose a different path. Inspired by the venture capital model, the New Bets framework treats Revolut as an ecosystem of internal startups.
We empower our employees to act as entrepreneurs. We seed multiple promising initiatives with limited upfront investment, providing them with the resources of a global giant but the autonomy of a garage stage disruptor. We don’t ask, “Will this work in five years?” We ask, “Can we build, test, and iterate this in five months?”
We also provide a springboard all founders dream of: access to a world class ecosystem from day one. Instead of spending months hiring or navigating regulations, our teams have a global engine of 15,000 experts at their fingertips – from world-class engineering and design to integrated legal, compliance, and sales teams. This powerful setup allows us to accelerate an idea straight from concept to scaling at record speed. We foster a culture of fearless experimentation and constant idea generation. If an idea succeeds, we scale it. If it doesn’t, we quickly close it off and move to the next, creating a continuous innovation machine.
This approach has already delivered a suite of products that have moved from bets to pillars. RevPoints has transformed how our customers engage with loyalty; our eSIM offering has turned a banking app into a travel essential; and products like Business Savings and Rev Pro have solidified our status as a dual threat powerhouse for both retail and B2B customers.
Resilience through diversity
The true value of the framework isn’t just growth – its robustness. By successfully scaling 11 different products each generating more than £100million in annual revenue driven from our product suite, we have insulated the business against market volatility. If the crypto market cools or FX volumes fluctuate, our wealth management or subscription engines accelerate.
Our rapid global expansion inherently raises the risk of complexity. While many companies address growth by building bureaucratic layers, we instead establish New Bets departments. This unique structure ensures risk assessment is instantaneous, avoiding the delays of traditional paper-based processes. Our digital, cloud-native foundation is the key enabler, allowing us to scale multiple initiatives simultaneously with minimal disruption to our core business and virtually no opportunity cost. This approach is fundamental to sustaining the high velocity development that is our defining characteristic.
The future of finance is a portfolio
The era of single-feature fintech is over. The winners of the next decade will be the platforms that can institutionalise innovation.
Our 2025 results prove that profitability and hyper-growth are not mutually exclusive. By fostering a culture where every employee is encouraged to identify the next New Bet, we aren’t just reacting to the market, we are staying ahead of it. This way the next billion dollar idea won’t be a competitor of Revolut – it will be part of it.
