Revolut has secured a full banking licence in France, giving the financial technology group a second regulated centre inside the European Union as it shifts part of its rapidly growing Western European customer base away from an operating structure centred on Lithuania.

Revolut Bank S.A. received the licence after assessment by France’s Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel et de Résolution and the European Central Bank, with the final decision adopted by the ECB Governing Council. The new French entity will begin with customers in France before expanding to Germany, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain.

Revolut’s existing Lithuanian bank will remain responsible for customers elsewhere in the European Economic Area, creating a dual-hub structure. Both entities will remain within the European supervisory system, but the French operation brings regulatory management and product development closer to the markets where the company is growing most quickly.

Western Europe now accounts for roughly 30 million Revolut customers, including close to eight million added during 2025, while the company’s global customer base exceeds 75 million. Revolut has committed more than €1 billion to the region and plans to hire more than 600 employees across Western Europe, including 400 in France, alongside a Paris headquarters scheduled to open in 2027.

The licence changes more than the address of the regulator. Revolut has previously served EU markets by passporting the banking authorisation held by its Lithuanian entity, an efficient arrangement for expanding a common digital product across multiple countries. A regulated institution in France gives the group more scope to build local banking relationships and tailor services such as lending and regulated savings to individual markets.

European fintech is therefore entering a different phase from the one in which software and passporting allowed digital banks to enter countries quickly without recreating incumbent branch networks. As customer bases become larger and product sets broaden, national regulation, balance-sheet management, consumer rules, and local product design become more prominent parts of the operating model.

Revolut’s answer is not to abandon centralisation, but to add another institutional layer. Lithuania remains important to the wider EEA operation, while France becomes the base for a cluster of large Western European markets. In effect, the company is dividing Europe into regulated operating regions while keeping the digital platform and brand substantially international.

That structure could also alter competition with incumbent banks. Revolut built much of its early growth around payments, foreign exchange, cards, and fee-generating services, but a fuller banking relationship depends increasingly on deposits, credit, savings, mortgages, and services for companies. Those products can produce deeper customer relationships and different funding economics, while also bringing additional capital and compliance obligations.

The company’s business-banking operation extends the consequences beyond retail finance. Revolut says its business platform already serves hundreds of thousands of organisations across Europe, meaning local banking capability can feed into accounts, payments, treasury functions, and other financial services used by companies as well as individuals.

France is also becoming an operating centre rather than merely a sales market. Revolut has recruited former Société Générale chief executive Frédéric Oudéa to chair the French banking entity and Béatrice Cossa-Dumurgier to lead Western Europe, while the planned Paris headquarters gives the region its own executive base.

The move comes only months after Revolut obtained a full UK banking licence in March, extending a process in which one of Europe’s best-known fintech challengers is steadily acquiring the regulatory architecture of a large international bank. Technology allowed Revolut to scale without copying the traditional branch network, but growth still requires licences, capital, governance, compliance systems, and supervisors in the markets where it wants deeper customer relationships.

Execution will now be more important than the licence itself. French customers are due to move first, followed by five other Western European markets, requiring Revolut to migrate customers and products between regulated entities without disrupting a service built around the expectation that national borders largely disappear inside the app.

The French licence therefore marks a shift from entering European markets to building durable regulated infrastructure within them. Revolut has already shown that a digital banking platform can acquire customers quickly across borders; its next test is whether a dual-hub structure can support the local products and supervisory relationships needed to turn that scale into a broader banking business.