Why do businesses continue to innovate if they’ve already reached success? 

Revolut’s latest financial results showed Revolut Business raked in a whopping £4.5bn (US$6bn) in FY2025.

Making up 16% of the total revenue was Revolut Business, which also reached £277bn (US$371.17bn) in transaction volume.

Based in the UK, Revolut’s global HQ sits in London’s Canary Wharf – one of the first, and most important markets, the fintech could have emerged in.

James Gibson, Head at Revolut Business, provides a little insight into how the country plays a part in the expansion of the business. After all, growth starts at home. 

“The UK is our home,” James says. “We’re sitting in our HQ now and it’s still our primary market. For us, it’s an incredibly important country and one where we focus a lot of our time when it comes to product development and where we release products first, like Titan, for example.

“We’ve released first in the UK with a plan to release in other countries subsequently.” 

Revolut Business’s product, Titan, is the company’s first leap into the concept of luxury.

The concept aims to end the ultimatum between luxury and corporate discipline, positioning it as the ultra-premium corporate card. 

James notes that such an ultimatum wasn’t just a corporate need, and instead poses as a niche that Revolut Business could fill.

“What's more important is really solving a customer problem and ensuring that the products that we produce are what customers need. That’s really what most of our time goes into,” he says.

With Titan, the concept of value was first in mind. 

“We really think about what the product bundle which we can offer customers is and ensures that gives them the most value. The ‘wow’ elements on top of that – like a really cool card or some magic in the app – are things that we look to kind of sprinkle across all our products, but we don’t go in saying that’s the objective.” 

James and his team deliver solutions, not based on how the end result will look, but based on what the customer needs.

He adds: “We go in saying ’let’s solve a problem’ and then let’s give it some ‘wow’ at the end as well.” 

Global success seems to start by looking at the market, ultimately positioning Revolut as not only a global fintech leader but as an innovation example.

Across the entire Revolut team, CEO Nik Storonsky has ensured that creativity and innovation remain a constant bloodflow to the life of the business. 

James notes: “Nik Storonsky is heavily involved in the process – and I think this has a real effect across the whole company to keep everything very fresh and driven. We also try and keep a ‘day one’ mindset with everyone we hire – people who want to build, who want to innovate – and that’s why Revolut’s a great place for people who do want to do that.

“There's just so much white space out there that we want to go and fill. That's what keeps us motivated.”

Understanding evolving business needs

Applying the foundations of innovation and customer focus, Revolut Business has conducted research about global business, including a reimagined focus on travel.

Notably different in the wake of 2020, trends were highlighted by the research that shows businesses looking to increase spending on travel. 

What we’re finding is that in-person is still really valuable to many companies,” James explains.

“In fact, more than 80% of businesses are actually looking to or expecting to increase their spend on travel over the coming year.

“We’re seeing more and more people travelling in our research and we want to support them when they’re going global.

“We want to make sure the teams are there and can focus on their jobs. The whole product is designed to help these teams do that.”

Influenced by the research, Revolut Business utilises Titan, a product with a points reward scheme that includes eSIM plan linked to Perplexity and The Economist, to aid businesses and their productivity. 

James continues: “What we allow our customers to do is a business can sign up all of its employees onto our eSIM and then everyone has full access to the internet globally for as much as they need.”

Revolut Business’ upcoming plans also include its treasury products, designed to allow businesses growth through investments and savings.

This is because, James says, “a lot of our effort at the moment is going into building out that suite”.

Another area is payments infrastructure to ensure that the global aspect of the business remains up to date – something James establishes is a constant priority for the business.

He says: “There’s a whole ongoing workstream where we’re continually releasing more and more ways to receive, send and hold currency.”

The latest development James describes is the launch of Chinese yuan payments for many of Revolut Business’s customers.

The last area James touches on is the company’s spend management product – something that is also a priority in Revolut Business’ growth strategy.

He says: “We offer sophisticated tools to help them understand where they’re overspending and where they could make the whole procurement process more efficient. We’re building out that as well.”

Consolidating products and data 

James has witnessed some interesting fintech trends over the last few years, notably, that the concept of B2B has started catching up to B2C.

He explains: “First there was the wave of B2C fintechs like the Revolut personal product, which really started to revolutionise how people interact with their finances and 2019 and 2020 was an inflection point.

“Then, on the B2B side, it’s taken a few years more to get to a similar point. What we’ve seen in the last two years is an equivalent time for business products like Revolut Business.”

Perhaps taking inspiration from this second trend was Titan, as James explains that there has been an increase in the consolidation of products into a single, super-app.

“What you’re seeing at the moment is the kind of bundling of that into the ‘super products’ which I would classify Revolut Business as, where you can do everything in one place,” he explains.

“Historically – and this is particularly the case for business products – you would have many different platforms that you would manage your money through. You might have one for accepting payments, one for making payments, one for holding currencies in different countries and one for issuing cards.” 

The duality of AI James says, presents a different opportunity.

Here he pinpoints two areas that AI particularly serves to benefit in fintech: the customer-facing tools that increase access to financial literacy and, of course, agentic AI.

Customer-facing AI could only serve to increase demand as the technology consolidates control from analytics.

“I think this is only going to increase,” he says, “so businesses or people are able to query ‘what’s going on with my money’ and actually get insight into what’s happening.”

Presenting a more profitable opportunity is perhaps the introduction of agentic AI, which James says is “doing a lot of the heavy lifting on behalf of finance teams”. 

He adds: “What we have done is laced AI into the product and so we’re automating away a lot of what was manual work. Now it’s basically being done by these AI agents, but really it’s just automation to speed up their jobs.”

Is automation the replacement for human value?

Automation presents an important step for any fintech to grow, especially driven by data.

Businesses, just like consumers, grow by learning of opportunities through data presented to them, sometimes via automation, and sometimes from looking at key figures in their operations.

More than just financial figures, a company can dedicate its success to its staff and culture. 

James explains: “Hiring for the sake of hiring is not a good idea. Acquiring other businesses for the sake of acquiring other businesses is a really, really bad idea.

“Focusing on numbers and the ROI that these activities bring you is a really important thing. Focusing on the numbers is crucial.”

Future founders, innovators and CEOs could benefit from the sage advice given by James. He defines success by three principles: “Firstly, pick a hard problem to solve. Easy problems will be solved by lots of people – you need to pick a hard problem.

“Second, focus on product rather than growth, particularly early on. Your product is what will differentiate you – your marketing strategy is less likely to in the long term.” 

His last piece of sage advice to the future of fintech lies, of course, in its people: “And then hire a fantastic team. There’s only one of you and hopefully if your company is successful, there’ll be more people.

“Potentially, with the advent of AI, it would be less than it would have been historically, but you still need people and making sure that you're hiring the best people is again what’s going to set you apart from your competition.”