Revolut's 'purely organic' years, checked against its own accounts

In 2021 Revolut spent £51.6 million on advertising and marketing. In 2025 it spent £528.8 million. Both figures come from its own annual reports.

That is ten times more in four years.

Nik Storonsky, Revolut's co-founder and CEO, explained where the line sits on Cheeky Pint, John Collison's podcast, published on 10 November. Collison asked how the company grew. Storonsky said: "we actually started doing growth, I think, 2022. First time when we started having serious budgets on growth."

Collison checked: "But you didn't for the first seven years of—"

"No, we didn't. It was purely organic, yes."

So how did people find it? "Word of mouth. Plus we've done, obviously, PR as well."

Revolut was founded in 2015. That makes 2015 to 2021 the organic years. On 4 November, Revolut said it had closed a funding round at a $115 billion valuation. So the question is fair: how much of that was word of mouth, and how much was bought?

What the accounts say

Storonsky's date holds up. Revolut's 2022 annual report says it "deployed a £100+ million marketing budget" that year. It also launched its "first-ever brand marketing campaign in the UK." The advertising and marketing line went from £51.6 million in 2021 to £129.3 million in 2022.

So 2021 was not zero. But 2022 is the year the spending became a strategy.

Then it kept climbing. Here is the advertising and marketing line from each year's report:

• 2021: £51.6 million
• 2022: £129.3 million
• 2023: £241.3 million
• 2024: £359.2 million
• 2025: £528.8 million

The reports also give a second number: the share of new customers who joined "organically" or through a referral from someone they knew.

• 2022: "Four in five"
• 2023: "over 70%"
• 2024: "over 65%"
• 2025: "over 63%" of new retail customers, via "word-of-mouth or referrals" (from Revolut's 2025 results release; the 2025 annual report does not repeat it)

Read the two lists together. From 2022 to 2025, spending roughly quadrupled. Over the same years, the organic-or-referral share fell from 80% to over 63%. The 2025 figure counts retail customers only, so the comparison is close rather than exact. It fell, but it is still most new customers.

One caveat cuts against the "organic" label. Revolut pays referral rewards. The 2022 report says part of that year's budget went "to boost peer-to-peer referrals." So some "referred by someone they knew" customers were people a friend was paid to bring in.

Why it didn't go viral

Payments look like they should spread on their own. Every transfer has a sender and a receiver. Collison pushed on this, with PayPal as the classic case.

Storonsky said it did work at the start. "When we first launched, there was a lot of virality because we were doing onboarding. I think it was up to €1,000 or €100, you can do it without KYC." KYC (know your customer) is the set of identity checks a regulated firm must run before it opens an account.

Then the rules tightened: "I think it was stopped 2017 or something." After that, every new user had to pass the checks first. Collison put it to him that this made the viral loop harder. "Oh yeah, 100%."

His view of the loop now is blunt. A K-factor is how many new users each user brings in. Above 1, growth feeds itself. "Everything what we tried so far, last 12 years, always less than 1."

The free takeaway: Revolut spent seriously on growth only after word of mouth had proved the product, and it treats the ad budget as an extra on top of that, not a replacement. The 2022 report says the spending is checked against "strict Return On Investment (ROI) constraints at country and channel level." In the 2025 report, the budget grew 47% "while maintaining strict adherence to our payback period constraints."

The product that failed the payback test

Storonsky gave one example of what happens when a product cannot grow without the ads.

In November 2022, Revolut announced "Revolut Lite", a streamlined version of its app, for "several countries across Latin America, SouthEast Asia and the Middle East." Lite users could send money across borders "in seconds" and for free.

Storonsky told Collison what it was for. "The idea was to build Venmo internationally." By his account it went out to more than 100 countries, without a banking licence.

Then:

"It didn't really work out because we thought distribution costs would be much lower. It didn't really grow organically fast enough, so we had to do performance marketing. And then unit economics with the performance marketing didn't really work in terms of payback."

That is the whole method in three sentences. Organic growth comes first. If it is too slow, paid growth has to pay back. If it does not, the product goes.

He brought it up to explain why ideas get a money check before they are built. Most pass, "in the majority of cases, 90% of cases," he said. Lite was the exception.

How a new product earns its budget

Revolut calls these "new bets." The 2025 annual report describes a "New Bets Framework" run on "a venture capital-inspired model." It names products that went through it: RevPoints, eSIMs, ATMs, Bill Pay, Business Savings and Rev Pro. The 2024 report adds Revolut X, its crypto exchange.

Storonsky laid out the steps.

1. Anyone can pitch. A team checks the unit economics. Then people "who have built new bets before" and general managers review it.
2. A small team builds it. He described a team of 10. From the decision to launch usually takes "12–18 months."
3. It launches in one test country, "for example, Ireland or UK." If it works, it goes to more countries and into the automated cross-sell engine. That engine is a model that picks which product to show each customer, and when.
4. It is graded against every past bet. Revolut has "historical data on performance of about 100 bets," he said. The measure is gross profit, month by month: "month one after launch: 'What is the gross profit compared to previous bets?'" Then month two, three, four, twelve.
5. The ranking decides. "If it is top 25% quantile of all the bets, we just scale it up." More teams, then a department. "Bottom 25%, we don't do much. We redistribute the team to do something else." The middle is a judgment call.

One brake stops a quick shutdown. If customers already depend on the product, "we just keep it as it is. We stop investing in it, so we just maintain it."

Products that don't earn money directly still get a score. Storonsky tracks "direct GP" (gross profit) and "indirect GP." His example was RevPoints, the rewards scheme: "As accounting GP, it's very small, but then if you calculate indirect GP, that's very high." The 2025 report says 17 million customers now earn RevPoints in 36 countries.

Collison asked about slow starters. Do products ever start flat, then take off? "To be honest, it's almost never happened. I don't even remember the example…" His rule: "Usually trend is your friend."

He gives a reason most companies can't be this strict. "Other companies, they do probably 7–8 bets. And the feedback loop is delayed, plus management changes." Around 100 bets is what makes the curve worth trusting.

Where his own judgment lost

Storonsky says he backs almost every idea pitched to him, and gives the reason: "I just had too many failures in the past when my judgment was wrong, so now I'm fully optimistic."

His example is Ultra, the top paid plan. The subscriptions team pitched it. "I thought: 'I mean, the idea is okay. This business probably won't be very large.' It ended up being a very, very large business."

Revolut announced Ultra in June 2023 at £540 a year in the UK. Its 2024 report lists the launch for the UK and EEA. Subscription revenue rose 74% to £423 million in 2024. It rose another 67% to £708 million in 2025, per Revolut's results release.

Revolut does not split out Ultra's share of that. The 2024 report credits "enhanced benefits across our paid plans," not Ultra by name. So "very, very large" is Storonsky's word, not a number we can check.

Where he overruled the numbers

The opposite case is wealth, Revolut's crypto, trading and savings business. There, the metrics said fine and Storonsky said no.

"For example, wealth and trading product, I think two or three years ago it grew 60–80% year-on-year. Then I thought it's not enough, right? It should have been like 300%." He dug in and found the product and features weak. "Then we changed the team, and now it's growing 300%."

His point: "KPI can be met because of external factors and because of luck."

The accounts do show a year close to 300%. In the 2024 report, wealth revenue rose 298%, from £127.1 million to £506.3 million. But the report gives the reason as "increased crypto trading activity as observed throughout the industry and the launch of the Revolut X crypto exchange."

That is partly the external factor he warned about: a crypto market lifting every trading app. Revolut X, though, was itself a new bet.

And 2025 did not repeat it. Wealth revenue grew 31%, to £663 million. If "now it's growing 300%" means wealth revenue in 2025, the published accounts don't show it. He may mean a different measure, or the pace this year. He didn't say which.

The one slow burner he backs

Storonsky's own system says slow starters almost never take off. He named one thing he funds anyway: getting customers to pay their salary into Revolut.

"It's a very slow burner, right?" Depending on the country, he said, "10–20% of monthly active users we have are salaried accounts." A customer who only sends a friend $20 is "not very profitable for us."

His fix is to start young. "As soon as we capture kids, then we can easily move them to the 18+ account, because it's very hard to move adults." He says Revolut already has more than half of people up to 35 in most of its European countries, and struggles with over-50s, "who still hold majority of liquid assets."

Our read, not his: the bets curve grades products over 12 months. Salary accounts are a bet on customers over years. It is not run on the same clock, and it can't be.

Word of mouth, a second time

The last number is the one that ties it together. Revolut used to model churn in detail. Now it follows each country's sign-up cohort at 12, 18 and 24 months.

"Out of 100 customers, monthly active can be, say, 60 people can be monthly active. But then after two years, it will be 65, 70 customers. People return to us."

Why? "They still hear about it from friends, family, and then they come back."

That is the organic engine from 2015, still running. Revolut now spends half a billion pounds a year on marketing. Even so, Storonsky's explanation for customers coming back is the same answer he gave for 2015: word of mouth.