Revolut became a UK bank on 11 March 2026, and the account a non resident director opened last year may still sit with the e-money firm

The question I had wrong

Is Revolut a bank? For a long time the careful answer in the UK was no. It was an e-money firm with a banking licence in Lithuania and a UK bank stuck in a waiting room, and I had stopped checking it. When I went looking for the Revolut card in Bank Index this week, a public directory that labels every firm by what it legally is and scores it from 0 to 10 on what a business needs, the label read Digital bank. I was wrong, and I had been wrong since March. Six months is a long time to be wrong.

The card's summary puts it in one sentence: the PRA lifted restrictions on Revolut Bank UK Ltd on 11 March 2026 after a 20-month mobilisation. Revolut's own announcement from that morning says the bank received approval to exit the mobilisation phase and launch as a bank in the UK, with an existing base of 13 million UK customers. I checked the date on it twice.

So the short answer for anyone searching today is yes, there is a Revolut bank in the UK. The longer answer matters more to a director running a UK company from abroad, because the account you opened before March may not be in it yet.

What changed, and what did not

Mobilisation is the stage where a new bank holds a licence with restrictions while it builds up. Leaving it means Revolut Bank UK Ltd can take deposits like any other bank. The announcement says this lets Revolut offer “deposit accounts protected by the FSCS on eligible deposits” and that the change covers both retail and business customers.

The same announcement is honest about timing. The wording there is careful, and it matters. Current accounts were to roll out to new customers in stages, starting with a small group. For existing customers, it said, “nothing changes immediately”, and the migration to the new bank was expected to take a few months in total. I read that sentence three times over.

That sentence is the whole point for a Ltd. Until your own account has moved, the money sits where it sat before, with the e-money business, under safeguarding rather than deposit insurance. Our note on e-money and the FSCS explains what that means on the day something fails. I cannot tell you from outside whether your company's account has moved in the 6 months since. Revolut can, and the account terms in the app should name the entity. The app is the place to look. I would still ask Revolut in writing.

The Revolut card scores the United Kingdom line 8.5 and cites the launch page as its source. It scores financial strength 6.0, and the reason reads like a ledger: unrated, but a licensed bank with 4.9 billion pounds of CET1 capital and 2.3 billion dollars of profit before tax in 2025, offset by a 2025 Lithuanian anti-money laundering fine and restrictions imposed by the ECB in 2026.

What the cards say about the others

I read the 5 neighbouring cards the same way, because the question a non resident director really asks is not is Revolut a bank but which of these is, and whether it will have me.

Wise is labelled E-money or payment institution. Its card says so twice, in two different lines. The summary calls it a London-based e-money institution, not a bank, listed on Nasdaq and the London Stock Exchange, and the United Kingdom line reads: “FCA e-money institution 900507 offering GBP business accounts with local account details, but not a bank and no FSCS cover.” So is Wise a bank, then? No, and nothing on the card suggests it is trying to become one.

Tide is labelled E-money or payment institution too. I had assumed Tide held a banking licence itself. Its card is careful about a detail that surprised me. Tide Platform Limited is authorised by the FCA as an e-money institution under reference 900843, granted on 1 May 2018, but the current and savings accounts are provided by ClearBank, so eligible balances are covered by the FSCS up to 120,000 pounds. So is Tide a bank at all? Not on its card, which answers the next question too: the money itself sits in a bank.

ClearBank has a card of its own, labelled Digital bank. I did not know ClearBank before this week. It sells accounts, payment scheme access and FX to other regulated firms rather than to the public, and it names Revolut and Tide among its clients. At the end of 2025 it held 17.8 billion pounds of customer deposits across 17.1 million accounts.

Starling is the plain case of the five. Its card labels it Digital bank, authorised by the PRA on 12 July 2016, with a business account that has no monthly fee and more than 500,000 business owners on it. So is Starling a bank in the full sense? Yes, and it has been since 2016.

The size of each, as the cards give it

The labels answer the legal question. The summaries answer the practical one, which is how big each firm is and how much of the numbers it publishes. I copied them into one table, and the spread is odd enough to be worth printing in prose.

Revolut reports more than 80 million customers in 40 countries, over 750,000 business customers on plans from 10 to 90 pounds a month, and total assets of 43.0 billion pounds at the end of 2025. Its customer satisfaction line scores 9.5, on a Trustpilot rating of 4.7 from 455,140 reviews, and its overall score is 6.2.

Wise also scores 6.2 overall, level with Revolut. It reports 19 million active customers, 39 billion dollars of customer funds, and 243.5 billion dollars moved across borders in the year to 31 March 2026, with profit before tax of 660.4 million dollars in FY26.

Tide scores lower, at 4.7 overall. It said it crossed 2 million members worldwide on 27 May 2026, with 900,000 in the UK and a stated 15 per cent of the UK small business market. Its strength line scores 4.0: no credit rating, a net loss of 14,238,000 pounds for 2024 and net assets of 7,674,000 pounds, though it raised over 120 million dollars at a 1.5 billion dollar valuation in September 2025.

Starling scores 4.8 overall, which surprised me until I read the lines underneath. In the year to 31 March 2026 its group reported 16.6 billion pounds of assets, 12.7 billion of customer deposits, 217 million of pre-tax profit and a CET1 ratio of 28.58 per cent. The strength line still stops at 6.0, because the bank carries no published rating from S&P, Moody's or Fitch and was fined 29 million pounds by the FCA in 2024.

ClearBank scores 4.2, which says more about what the index measures than about ClearBank. It does not sell to the public, so most of the needs a small company has, from onboarding to cards, score low. A bank can be very large, very important and a poor fit for your company, all at once.

Where a non resident director stands

Here the scores turn over. Every card also has a line called Foreign-owned and non-resident companies, and for this audience it is the line that decides everything else.

Starling, a bank since 2016, scores 1.0 on it. Its reason quotes the eligibility page, which requires that “all persons of significant control and all directors with account access are residents of the United Kingdom”, and adds that only Companies House limited companies and LLPs are accepted. A director in Lisbon or Dubai is out before the form starts. I had never read that page before.

Tide scores 3.0, because every applicant needs a UK mobile number and a device registered to a UK app store, and “only directors of Companies House limited companies may have a home address overseas.” Revolut scores 7.5: the company must be registered in the UK, the EEA or the US, and the applicant must live in the UK, the EEA, the US, Australia, Singapore or India, with everyone else on a waiting list. Wise scores 8.0, because registration is online from most countries and it publishes the list of places it does not serve.

So the firm most likely to open an account for a director abroad is the one that is not a bank, and the bank with the highest UK score of the group is the one that will not take you. I find that hard to read past, although it is not new. It is simply clearer when the scores sit side by side. No provider's marketing puts them there.

I did not expect Revolut to land in the middle. It sits there in a way it did not a year ago. It is now a bank and it still accepts directors in several countries outside the UK. Whether its new bank takes the same view of non resident directors as the e-money business did, I have not been able to confirm from its public pages as of 24 September.

A short digression about the word digital

An aside, because the label on 3 of these cards is Digital bank and it can sound like a lesser category. It has nothing to do with the licence. Starling and Revolut Bank UK hold the same kind of authorisation as a high street bank. Digital describes how they reach customers, through an app and with no branches, and it says nothing at all about what the regulator allows them to do, what happens to your deposit if they fail or whether the compensation scheme stands behind the balance you see on the screen.

Back to the question. The label that matters is the one before the word bank, and whether the word bank is there at all.

How I would check, in about ten minutes

Open the United Kingdom section of Bank Index. On 24 September it listed 1,795 UK firms, 540 of them banks and 455 e-money and payment institutions, each found in a financial register. Find the provider and read the label under the name first.

Read the United Kingdom line and the non resident line next. The first tells you where the money sits and under what cover; the second tells you whether a director abroad can apply at all. Follow the source links, which go to the provider's own eligibility and pricing pages, and confirm the status on the Financial Services Register, as our earlier note describes, because a card is a snapshot with a date on it and the register is the only place where the status on the day you sign is recorded by the regulator itself.

Some cards are thinner than others. The label, though, is there on every card. The Monzo card, for example, is built from the registers alone: it confirms a PRA authorised bank, Companies House company 09446231 incorporated on 18 February 2015, and says only 1 of its scores is backed by the bank's own pages. That is still enough to answer the question of whether it is a bank, and not enough to answer whether it will open your account.

What I still cannot tell you

I cannot say how far Revolut's migration has gone by 24 September. The announcement said a few months in total, and that was in March. Nothing I found on the public pages gives a date on which the last UK business account moved, and I would not guess one.

I also cannot tell you whether the Lithuanian fine and the ECB restrictions on the card touch the UK bank at all. The card lists them under group strength, which is fair, and I suspect they concern the EU entity rather than the UK one. That is a guess, and only a guess.

I keep thinking about how long the old answer lasted in my head. My own view has changed on this. I had carried the old answer for so long that the change in March passed me by, and the card caught it before I did.