Revolut just picked up the Australian approval that turns its app into a bank, and that makes the big four fight more real than it was last week.
APRA granted Revolut Payments Australia a licence to operate as an authorised deposit-taking institution on July 21, 2026. That's the approval it needed. Revolut can now move beyond cards, currency exchange and stored-value accounts in Australia, taking deposits and building lending products under the same prudential regime as the banks it wants to annoy.
According to APRA, Revolut Australia NOHC was also licensed as a non-operating holding company under the Banking Act 1959. It's Revolut's first banking licence in Asia-Pacific. The Financial Times reported it's also the company's second outside Europe, after Mexico. There's a proper deposit guarantee behind the local app now, too: deposits with authorised banks are covered by Australia's Financial Claims Scheme up to $250,000 per account holder.
That's the real unlock. Before this week, money sitting with Revolut in Australia wasn't protected in the same way as a deposit at Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, NAB or ANZ. You can offer a sharp app and cheaper foreign exchange. You can't manufacture trust. A banking licence does some of that work for you.
The company has been building toward this for years. Revolut secured an Australian Credit Licence from ASIC in February 2022 and said at the time that it wanted to offer credit and personal lending products in the market. The Financial Times reported this week that Revolut is backing the Australian expansion with an A$400 million investment and already has about 1.2 million local users. That is not a cold start.
A direct shot at the big four
Revolut's Australian boss, Matt Baxby, put the target on the record long before APRA handed over the licence. In a 2021 parliamentary committee hearing, Baxby said Revolut's mission was to directly challenge incumbent banks with wide margins, a suboptimal user experience and business models reliant on customer apathy. Frankly, that line still works because the market has not changed enough.
If you've watched Australia's neobank graveyard fill up, you know why this is a hard claim to make. Xinja shut down and returned deposits to customers in 2020. 86 400 was acquired by NAB in 2021. Volt returned deposits and exited banking in 2022. Judo Bank survived by choosing a narrower fight, lending to small and medium-sized businesses instead of trying to become the everyday account for households.
Revolut is choosing the harder road. It is going straight at retail customers with a full licence, a global brand and a product set that already includes foreign exchange, trading and business accounts in Australia. Reuters reported in 2021 that the big four controlled about 80% of Australia's banking sector. That is the moat Revolut is walking toward.
The first product push is savings. Finance Magnates reported that retail customers are being offered instant-access savings accounts with no minimum deposit, daily paid interest and a top rate of 5.05% a year on the highest plan tier, while business customers can get up to 4.25%. Those rates won't by themselves break Commonwealth Bank. They do give Revolut a simple opening line when a customer asks why they should move idle cash out of an old account.
The IPO pitch gets stronger
The Australian licence also lands at the right time for Revolut's bigger story. The company completed a secondary share sale in November 2025 at a $75 billion valuation, according to Revolut's own announcement. TechCrunch reported in April that Revolut was preparing another secondary sale for the second half of 2026 that could value it at more than $100 billion, with investors discussing a possible IPO valuation of $150 billion to $200 billion.
Those are enormous numbers. They need proof. Revolut's 2025 annual report says revenue reached $6 billion and profit before tax rose 57% year on year to about $2.3 billion. The company says it now has more than 75 million personal customers globally, more than 800,000 business customers and banking operations in more than 30 countries. Add Australia to that list and the IPO pitch becomes less theoretical.
None of this means Australians will suddenly dump their main bank. Salary payments, mortgages, credit cards and business loans create habits that are hard to break. But a foreign fintech with APRA approval, a deposit guarantee and more than a million local users is a different competitor from the prepaid-card app Australia first saw in 2020.
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