It is a conversation that has happened in virtually every household in Ireland.
My 18-year-old son was going out for the evening and needed the €25 I had promised him for helping out with some jobs around the house. I already pay him a small fortnightly allowance from my Bank of Ireland account into the AIB account he opened last summer when he got a part-time job, but this was an ad hoc remittance.
“Revolut,” he said, before closing the door behind him. “It’ll be faster.” When it comes to instant person-to-person payments, nobody matches Revolut, at least not in the Irish market.
The app is in virtually everyone’s pocket. With three million customers on its payments platform, the company rivals AIB, Ireland’s largest bank, for market penetration, reaching about three quarters of the adult population. About half a million of its customers are teenagers, too, making Revolut the financial service provider of choice for the next generation.
But that could be about to face a challenge. In the next few weeks, AIB, Bank of Ireland and PTSB will launch Zippay, a digital service that will allow customers to send, request and split instant payments with anyone in their contacts who also has an account with a participating institution. An Post, Avant Money and the credit unions are all in advanced talks to join as well.
Announced in September, Zippay will be available in-app for all customers of the three banks, meaning the person-to-person payments functionality will be seamlessly available and, crucially, accessible, via a login, in a few taps — just like Revolut.
Here is the problem that it solves: for me to pay my son his €25 bank-to-bank, I’d have to open my Bank of Ireland app and go through a painful, multi-step process to authorise the payment, which would not clear until the next business day at best. It is even a worse slog for a new payee, which requires inputting their 22-character IBAN — if you know it.
My son, a digital native, understandably did not want to wait a full business day or more for a mere €25 transfer between the two halves of Ireland’s banking duopoly. Zippay compresses that timeline and eliminates several cumbersome steps, effectively trumping Revolut by offering the same functionality but without having to move money from your bank first.
In this way, Zippay exploits Revolut’s hidden vulnerability: customers do not leave much money there. According to banking sources, the average current account holder at a traditional bank moves about €300 a month into Revolut. By contrast, fewer than 5 per cent of Revolut customers have their salary paid into their Revolut accounts, Malcolm Craig, the company’s Ireland country manager, told the Oireachtas finance committee last month.
Personally, I had just €17.53 in my Revolut account that evening, meaning I had to top it up — using Apple Pay, as it happens — to make sure my son could get his money right away. That around-the-world journey gives an unintended meaning to the Revolut brand. The banks are clearly hoping their own straight-line service will help them match the main competitive advantage of the biggest rival they have faced since Bank of Scotland, later HBOS, landed on Irish shores during the Celtic tiger. It is an opportunity they cannot afford to miss.
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“It’s a chance for the Irish banks to close a yawning gap with Revolut, but they’ll only have one chance,” said Denis McGoldrick, banking analyst with Goodbody, the AIB-owned stockbroker. “If it’s clunky or not slick enough, it won’t be successful. However, if it works as well, it will be a real challenge to Revolut.”
It will be the first time the challenger brand will be on the defensive in this market. To a large extent, the incumbent banks have successfully withstood Revolut’s incursion into payments by successfully building a moat around the real foundation of their profitability: current accounts, deposits and mortgages.
Revolut is popular and beloved because it is ubiquitous, easy to use and free for basic functionality. But the banks still own the life journey of banking. You may or may not have a bank account as a kid, but where your first work cheque gets paid creates a lifetime path dependence. It starts with a current account, then maybe a savings account and, finally, a mortgage.
Revolut knows this. That is why it took a big swing at current accounts and deposits, launching its first savings account in 2022 and introducing Irish IBANs in 2023. It is also why the company began sounding out the market in 2024 about launching mortgages in Ireland, canvassing brokers and even poaching a senior figure from Avant Money to develop a home loan product.
But the promised launch is yet to arrive. Revolut pushed back its pilot and rollout timeline throughout last year. The mortgage product is now indefinitely postponed, with no firm date on when Irish borrowers will see a Revolut mortgage and no clear concept of what the product will look like, how it will be distributed and at whom it will be aimed.
Informed sources say Revolut’s plan was to initially target its current account base to switch mortgage providers, rather than go after first-time buyers. Here it faced two problems. First, it did not have a very deep pool of current account customers to draw from. Second, the mortgage market is fiercely competitive, much harder to crack than payments.
“Revolut haven’t been able to convert most of their customers,” said John Cronin, managing director of Seapoint Insights, an independent research consultancy. “They’re having a hard time convincing customers to move their primary current account. They’re nowhere on deposits. This makes it harder longer term to displace the banks as the primary relationship.”
The competitive backdrop is not getting any easier, either. Bankinter, the Spanish owner of Avant Money, got its Irish banking licence last year and is expanding its product range from mortgages, personal loans and credit cards into deposits and current accounts. Its market-leading savings account is having its full launch, complete with a marketing blitz, this month. Plans are under way to pilot a current account service later in the year.
Meanwhile PTSB is up for sale, with Austria’s Bawag believed to be a leading contender to buy it, alongside a handful of private equity firms with deep experience in the banking sector. One way or another, someone with deep pockets will be in control of Ireland’s third-force bank.
So with the domestic retail banks launching a competing payments service, foreign entrants joining the market and its own mortgages on the back burner, did Revolut blow its chance to disrupt the banking system?
“One of the most common questions I got from investors last year was, ‘When is Revolut going to launch mortgages?’” said McGoldrick. “From a bank share price point of view, the delays are great news.”
Revolut is not known for moving slowly. Its culture is more tech start-up than pinstripes and bowler hats, even though its founders, Nik Storonsky and Vladyslav Yatsenko, once worked for Credit Suisse.
Vladyslav Yatsenko
BENJAMIN CREMEL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The company originated from Storonsky’s frustration with having to pay so much in foreign exchange fees when travelling. He knew, from insider experience, that banks were charging handsomely on FX transactions out of sheer inertia. A more efficient, tech-enabled approach could capture that market by being much cheaper and offering tighter spreads.
Thus, Revolut was born — not as a bank account, but as a replacement for cash that allowed customers to pay in different currencies instantly. That unique selling point is still there and forms the backbone of Revolut’s appeal.
“They have novel solutions to banking problems,” said Diarmaid Sheridan, banking analyst with Davy, the stockbroker owned by Bank of Ireland. “They have banking-like products but are not a full banking suite. That gave them immediate advantages because it was optimised without a lot of the manual legacy expenses that are in the banks.”
It is no accident that Revolut brought stock investing, crypto trading and perks-based subscription plans to its customer base before interest-bearing savings accounts. It was playing a different game entirely.
That legacy is plain to see in its revenue profile. The company had net operating income of a little more than €1.6 billion in the third quarter of 2025. About €500 million of that was interest income, which Revolut earns mostly through laying off deposits with the European Central Bank for a risk-free margin — just like every other bank in Europe did when rates went up. Based on its 2024 annual results, the rest of its income is split roughly between card interchange fees, trading commissions, foreign exchange and subscriptions.
Indeed, Revolut is not just run like a tech company, it is also valued like one. While not publicly traded on stock exchanges, Revolut’s indicative value, based on a private fundraising in November, is $75 billion.
Mortgages may be the kind of challenge that tech companies are not evolved to master. Revolut’s advantages versus the banks — speed, innovation, disruption — are not quite as decisive when it comes to home loans versus payments and simple transactions.
“When you look at banks that are successful at lending, you’ll see it’s in how they manage their balance sheet and cost of capital,” said Sheridan. “Banks create efficiencies in how they raise funds over the long term.”
That is precisely where the firmly embedded deposit franchise of AIB, Bank of Ireland and PTSB is so telling. Having 90 per cent of the €170 billion Irish deposit market means they have the cheap funds to be competitive on price and boss the mortgage market.
It is telling that the only real competitor of scale apart from those three is Avant Money — a branch of another mainstream bank.
Revolut’s plan on mortgages was to compete on service, to have a painless application, underwriting and drawdown process. Others, like Nua Money, are trying the same thing already. But competing on service becomes difficult if you cannot also match price. Mortgage borrowers famously want to maximise their loans; every basis point in interest cost reduces their maximum principal.
There is also a deeper issue: trust. Pearse Doherty, the Sinn Fein finance spokesman, took aim at Revolut’s customer service at last month’s Oireachtas hearing, revealing he had taken a case against the company with the Financial Services Ombudsman last year.
Pearse Doherty took a case against the company with the Financial Services Ombudsman last year
BRIAN LAWLESS/PA
A Revolut spokesman told the Business Post that it was “committed to the highest standard of customer service, which has led millions of customers in Ireland to refer [Revolut] to their friends and family”.
Mortgage broker sources said Revolut’s lean approach to customer service — it has no branches — meant it would most likely have to use brokers to distribute any mortgage product it launched, as borrowers want a high-touch service. Mortgage brokers charge 1 per cent commission, which would eat up a chunk of the efficiencies gained through smarter application and underwriting systems.
“The fact that they haven’t persuaded a lot of people to move [their salary] is an indication of the scale of the challenge of getting the trust of customers,” Sheridan said. “Whereas the banks will slowly roll out improvements in areas where they think they need to meet customer expectations. It’s hard to dislodge a superpower.”
Nonetheless, Revolut is persisting in its experiment with mortgages and has completed some refinancings in Lithuania, where it is licensed, and plans to export the knowledge it gains there to other countries. Its Irish lending team remains in place and is continuing to test its proposition for the local market.
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But while the banks certainly see Revolut as the upstart most likely to undermine their dominance — executives track transfers to the app obsessively — does Revolut see itself as a giant killer?
Perhaps it once did, but the company pivots quickly when its plans fail. For instance, it started life in Ireland with a core group of former Ulster Bank executives who departed once the initial strategy of getting an Irish banking licence did not work out. It is trying Paris instead. Revolut is still waiting for full approval for its UK banking licence, having run into regulatory speed bumps. In the US, it is reconsidering its approach, after getting pushback on federal authorisation in America’s infamously fragmented state banking system.
The plan still seems to be to solve specific financial services problems digitally, not simply to reproduce traditional banking in a digital environment.
“Do they even want to be a bank?” McGoldrick said. “Lending is quite capital intensive. It looks like they have a fine business as it is and maybe they are reconsidering their strategy.”
The Revolut mortgage revolution at best has been postponed.