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.

Salesforce investors voted against the company’s compensation plan for top executives, after shareholder advisory groups raised concerns about equity awards granted to CEO Marc Benioff.

According to a regulatory filing on Monday, the resolution to approve the compensation received 339.3 million votes in favor and 404.8 million against at the annual meeting held on Thursday.

The board had urged shareholders to vote in favor of the resolution. But two shareholder advisory firms, Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services, both recommended that investors vote down the measure.

For the 2024 fiscal year, Benioff received $39.6 million in total pay, up from $29.9 million in the prior year. While Benioff’s salary was flat at $1.55 million, he received additional stock and option awards and nonequity incentive plan compensation, according to the proxy statement. The most recent sum also included security fees that had not previously been invoiced to the company.

In January, the board’s compensation committee gave Benioff a second long-term equity award worth $20 million, in recognition of the company’s “successful transformation actions and strong financial performance in the fiscal year,” among other factors.

Glass Lewis wrote in its recommendation that “shareholders may reasonably be wary of the substantial discretionary equity grants” issued to Benioff in January, adding that there was a “lack of a fully convincing rationale” behind the grants.

Benioff was already among the largest holders of Salesforce, with a stake of over 2% valued at close to $6 billion. Glass Lewis said in its proxy paper that the additional performance-based restricted stock units and stock options were “unwarranted” because his interests were already aligned with that of shareholders.

The vote from the annual meeting is nonbinding.

“Our Compensation Committee, which is responsible for designing and administering our executive compensation program, values the opinions expressed by our stockholders and will consider the outcome of this vote when making future executive compensation decisions,” Salesforce’s board said in the company’s proxy statement.

The company declined to comment.

Salesforce shares rose 67% in the 2024 fiscal year ended Jan. 31, the strongest performance since 2011.

Net income jumped to $4.1 billion in the fiscal year from $208 million a year earlier, while revenue increased 11% to $34.9 billion from $31.4 billion. In January 2023, Salesforce announced plans to lay off 10% of employees, after activist investors began buying up stakes and demanding a better mix of profit and growth. Salesforce said in February it would begin paying a dividend to shareholders.

Salesforce shares are off 2.6% year to date.

The Supreme Court on Monday wiped existing rulings around two state laws that aim to prevent tech companies from banning users over potentially harmful rhetoric. The move prolongs a debate over whether Republicans will be able fight what they view as “censorship” by leading social media platforms.

The Court sent the issue back to lower courts for further review, arguing that the previous rulings failed to properly explore whether the content moderation laws would be unconstitutional under all circumstances.

Texas and Florida have passed legislation that Republican lawmakers claim will stop tech companies including Facebook parent Meta; X, formerly known as Twitter; and Google’s YouTube from stifling conservative opinions. The states argue the laws ensure all users have equal access to the platforms, while the tech companies, which are represented by groups including NetChoice, say they violate the companies’ free speech rights.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote the majority opinion, and no justices dissented. She wrote that the lower courts had previously argued how the laws would apply to the largest social media platforms such as Facebook, and in doing so, they failed to consider how it might affect “other kinds of websites and apps” such as Uber or Etsy.

“Today, we vacate both decisions for reasons separate from the First Amendment merits, because neither Court of Appeals properly considered the facial nature of NetChoice’s challenge,” Kagan wrote.

Texas and Florida introduced the laws in 2021 after former President Donald Trump was banned from Twitter because of inflammatory posts surrounding the results of the 2020 presidential election and the ensuing riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump is now the leading Republican candidate in the 2024 presidential race.

The laws in Texas and Florida were enacted before Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk acquired Twitter for about $44 billion in 2022. Musk allowed Trump to return to Twitter that November.