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LONDON — The boss of British financial technology giant Revolut told CNBC he is optimistic about the company’s chances of being granted a U.K. banking license, as a jump in users saw the firm report record full-year pre-tax profits.
In an exclusive interview with CNBC, Nikolay Storonsky, Revolut’s CEO and co-founder, said that the company is feeling confident about securing its British bank license, after overcoming some key hurdles in its more than three-year-long journey toward gaining approval from regulators.
“Hopefully, sooner or later, we’ll get it,” Storonsky told CNBC via video call. Regulators are “still working on it,” he added, but so far haven’t raised any outstanding concerns with the fintech.
Storonsky noted that Revolut’s huge size has meant that it’s taken longer for the company to get its banking license approved than would have been the case for smaller companies. Several small financial institutions have been able to win approval for a banking license with few customers, he added.
“U.K. banking licenses are being approved for smaller companies,” Storonsky said. “They usually approve someone twice every year,” and they typically tend to be smaller institutions. “Of course, we are very large, so it takes extra time.”
Revolut is a licensed electronic money institution, or EMI, in the U.K. But it can’t yet offer lending products such as credit cards, personal loans, or mortgages. A bank license would enable it to offer loans in the U.K. The firm has faced lengthy delays to its application, which it filed in 2021.
One key issue the company faced was with its share structure being inconsistent with the rulebook of the Prudential Regulation Authority, which is the regulatory body for the financial services industry that sits under the Bank of England.
Revolut has multiple classes of shares and some of those share classes previously had preferential rights attached. One conditions set by the Bank of England for granting Revolut its U.K. banking license, was to collapse its six classes of shares into ordinary shares.
Revolut has since resolved this, with the company striking a deal with Japanese tech investor SoftBank to transfer its shares in the firm to a unified class, relinquishing preferential rights, according to a person familiar with the matter. News of the resolution with SoftBank was first reported by the Financial Times.
2023 a ‘breakout year’
The fintech giant on Tuesday released financial results showing full-year pre-tax profit rose to £438 million ($545 million) in 2023, swinging to the black from a pre-tax loss of £25.4 million in 2022. Group revenues rose by 95% to £1.8 billion ($2.2 billion), up from £920 million ($1.1 billion) in 2022.
Victor Stinga, Revolut’s chief financial officer, said the company’s growth stemmed from a record jump in user numbers — Revolut added 12 million customers in 2023 — as well as strong performance across all its key business lines, including card fees, foreign exchange and wealth, and subscriptions.
“We consider 2023 to be what we would call a breakout year from the point of view of growth and profitability,” Stinga said in an interview this week.
Revenue growth was driven by three main factors, Stinga said, including customer growth, strong performance across its key revenue lines, and a significant jump in interest income, which he said now accounts for about 28% of Revolut’s revenues.
He added that Revolut made exercising financial discipline a key priority in 2023, keeping a lid on operating expenses and adopting a “zero-based budgeting” philosophy, where every new expense has to be justified and accounted for before it’s considered acceptable.
This translated to administrative expenses growing far less than revenues did, Stinga said, with admin costs growing by 49% while revenues nearly doubled year-on-year.
Revolut has been investing more aggressively in advertising and marketing, he added, with the firm having deployed $300 million in advertising and marketing last year. The company’s business banking solutions are also a top priority, with Revolut devoting about 900 employees toward business-to-business sales.
A Waymo autonomous self-driving Jaguar electric vehicle sits parked at an EVgo charging station in Los Angeles, California, on May 15, 2024.
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Waymo said it will begin testing in Philadelphia, with a limited fleet of vehicles and human safety drivers behind the wheel.
“This city is a National Treasure,” Waymo wrote in a post on X on Monday. “It’s a city of love, where eagles fly with a gritty spirit and cheese that spreads and cheese that steaks. Our road trip continues to Philly next.”
The Alphabet-owned company confirmed to CNBC that it will be testing in Pennsylvania’s largest city through the fall, adding that the initial fleet of cars will be manually driven through the more complex parts of Philadelphia, including downtown and on freeways.
“Folks will see our vehicles driving at all hours throughout various neighborhoods, from North Central to Eastwick, and from University City to as far east as the Delaware River,” a Waymo spokesperson said.
With its so-called road trips, Waymo seeks to collect mapping data and evaluate how its autonomous technology, Waymo Driver, performs in new environments, handling traffic patterns and local infrastructure. Road trips are often used a way for the company to gauge whether it can potentially offer a paid ride share service in a particular location.
The expanded testing, which will go through the fall, comes as Waymo aims for a broader rollout. Last month, the company announced plans to drive vehicles manually in New York for testing, marking the first step toward potentially cracking the largest U.S. city. Waymo applied for a permit with the New York City Department of Transportation to operate autonomously with a trained specialist behind the wheel in Manhattan. State law currently doesn’t allow for such driverless operations.
Waymo One provides more than 250,000 paid trips each week across Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, Texas, and is preparing to bring fully autonomous rides to Atlanta, Miami, and Washington, D.C., in 2026.
Alphabet has been under pressure to monetize artificial intelligence products as it bolsters spending on infrastructure. Alphabet’s “Other Bets” segment, which includes Waymo, brought in revenue of $1.65 billion in 2024, up from $1.53 billion in 2023. However, the segment lost $4.44 billion last year, compared to a loss of $4.09 billion the previous year.
White House trade advisor Peter Navarro chastised Apple CEO Tim Cook on Monday over the company’s response to pressure from the Trump administration to make more of its products outside of China.
“Going back to the first Trump term, Tim Cook has continually asked for more time in order to move his factories out of China,” Navarro said in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “I mean it’s the longest-running soap opera in Silicon Valley.”
CNBC has reached out to Apple for comment on Navarro’s criticism.
President Donald Trump has in recent months ramped up demands for Apple to move production of its iconic iPhone to the U.S. from overseas. Apple’s flagship phone is produced primarily in China, but the company has increasingly boosted production in India, partly to avoid the higher cost of Trump’s tariffs.
Trump in May warned Apple would have to pay a tariff of 25% or more for iPhones made outside the U.S. In separate remarks, Trump said he told Cook, “I don’t want you building in India.”
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Analysts and supply chain experts have argued it would be impossible for Apple to completely move iPhone production to the U.S. By some estimates, a U.S.-made iPhone could cost as much as $3,500.
Navarro said Cook isn’t shifting production out of China quickly enough.
“With all these new advanced manufacturing techniques and the way things are moving with AI and things like that, it’s inconceivable to me that Tim Cook could not produce his iPhones elsewhere around the world and in this country,” Navarro said.
Apple currently makes very few products in the U.S. During Trump’s first term, Apple extended its commitment to assemble the $3,000 Mac Pro in Texas.
In February, Apple said it would spend $500 billion within the U.S., including on assembling some AI servers.
CoreWeave founders Brian Venturo, at left in sweatshirt, and Mike Intrator slap five after ringing the opening bell at Nasdaq headquarters in New York on March 28, 2025.
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Artificial intelligence hyperscaler CoreWeave said Monday it will acquire Core Scientific, a leading data center infrastructure provider, in an all-stock deal valued at approximately $9 billion.
Coreweave stock fell about 4% on Monday while Core Scientific stock plummeted about 20%. Shares of both companies rallied at the end of June after the Wall Street Journal reported that talks were underway for an acquisition.
The deal strengthens CoreWeave’s position in the AI arms race by bringing critical infrastructure in-house.
CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator said the move will eliminate $10 billion in future lease obligations and significantly enhance operating efficiency.
The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2025, pending regulatory and shareholder approval.
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The deal expands CoreWeave’s access to power and real estate, giving it ownership of 1.3 gigawatts of gross capacity across Core Scientific’s U.S. data center footprint, with another gigawatt available for future growth.
Core Scientific has increasingly focused on high-performance compute workloads since emerging from bankruptcy and relisting on the Nasdaq in 2024.
Core Scientific shareholders will receive 0.1235 CoreWeave shares for each share they hold — implying a $20.40 per-share valuation and a 66% premium to Core Scientific’s closing stock price before deal talks were reported.
After closing, Core Scientific shareholders will own less than 10% of the combined company.