Revolut also needs to ditch the more speculative business areas that it has dabbled in. These include “Stays”, a hotel booking service billed as a rival to Airbnb; a move into precious metals trading; and a highly lucrative operation as a cryptocurrency trading hub.
It has also launched something called “Payday”, marketed as a salary advance scheme that allows people to have up to half of their salaries drip fed to them instead of waiting until the end of the month.
The premise is nothing more than a scheme that helps workers to smooth out their monthly cash flow without having to turn to high-cost credit, but campaigners have warned it risks encouraging overspending and exacerbating cash flow problems that people may already be experiencing.
Not only does competing in the bottom end of the loan market seem like an unlikely path to riches, it is also an area that is fraught with reputational and financial risk, which is the very opposite of what Revolut needs.
The ultimate goal for the company is a full licence that will allow it to make loans and hold protected deposits, but first it must first spend some time in the Bank of England’s “mobilisation” stage. This allows it to build up its IT systems and other processes in preparation for becoming a fully-authorised bank.
That means even more scrutiny for an organisation that has too often looked uncomfortable under the spotlight.
Questions may also be asked as to whether Storonsky is the right person to continue running Revolut. Trailblazing entrepreneurs like to build dreams fast and without them many of the most successful and exciting companies of the 21st century such as Tesla, Meta and Amazon wouldn’t exist. But forceful personalities are not necessarily the best people to run a bank.
Perhaps Storonsky should step back and allow a more hands-off, passive outsider to take the reins. As the world realised after the financial crisis, banking is meant to be boring.