Mobile banking startup Revolut has announced its plans to built a “global licensing team” to secure banking, trading and credit licenses in multiple markets around the world.
As per the announcement, the team will take charge of the entire end-to-end licensing process - from the liaison with regulators - through to the execution of the requirements needed to obtain each license.
Commenting on the development, Nik Storonsky, founder & CEO of Revolut, said: “Building this team will be no easy task. We’re ideally looking for people who have previous experience in securing either a banking or trading license, and they should be quite technical and be comfortable working in a very fast-paced environment.”
The core team will include a Capital, Liquidity and Financial Modelling Manager, a Licence Business Planning Manager, a Licence Project Manager for Banking, a Licence Project Manager for Trading and a Global Head of Licence Operations.
In the initial phase, the bank will include the United States and the United Kingdom market in its licensing group with plans of global expansion.
Since its inception in 2015, Revolut expanded its business significantly in Europe with over 3.7 million users across 28 markets. The company is now preparing to launch in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Japan in the coming months. It has already secured licensing in Singapore and Japan, as previously reported by Finance Magnates.
Moreover, with the crypto rush, the company has jumped in the digital currency industry in early 2018 with the introduction of a mobile-based trading platform.
Brexit - a Dark Cloud over Financial Firms
The company is also concerned about the upcoming Brexit as it is still unclear how the UK will part itself from the EU. Like many banks operating in the EU, Revolut is worried about the effect on the passporting of its recently-acquired European banking license.
"Brexit is obviously a little bit of an inconvenience for us, but we've never been a reactive company. That's why we've now secured an EMI license in both the UK and Europe, and now that we have a European banking license in place, our next step is to secure a UK banking license," Storonsky added.
“From the talent side, we're not seeing any of signs that people not wanting to relocate to London, and we're proactively working with government ministers on lobbying for a specialized visa for high caliber software engineers and data scientists, so that it'll be far easier for this kind of talent to get into the country. If the UK is to remain the tech capital of Europe, we need to make it easy and fast for the best talent to come in.”
In addition, Revolut has recently signed an agreement with London-based RegTech company ClauseMatch to streamline management of internal policies, controls, and regulatory compliance.
