Revolut’s push to bank Americans directly just cleared its first major regulatory gate, with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granting conditional approval for a US national bank charter.
The concession is an early checkpoint, not a finished license. Two more federal regulators, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Federal Reserve, still have to sign off, and Revolut is targeting 2027 before it can operate as a fully chartered US bank.
A national charter would remove the fintech’s reliance on partner banks for US deposits and card issuance, changing the cost structure of its biggest expansion market. The London-based company, valued above $115B in a secondary share sale in July, has spent years building US card and payments products around that ambition.
Conditional approvals of this kind are routine first steps at the OCC, a signal that an application is heading in the right direction rather than a certification that a bank is ready to open. Several digital lenders have collected similar nods and remain deep in multi-year review, a reminder of the distance between this milestone and a live charter.
The development also shows US regulators warming to nonbank entrants at a time when European fintechs increasingly view America as the prize market for deposits and payments.
