Revolut enlists City grandee John McFarlane to help steer overseas push

A City veteran who once sat at the apex of Barclays and Aviva has been brought in by Revolut to help guide the fintech group’s ambitions abroad, underscoring how aggressively the company is preparing for life beyond the domestic market.

John McFarlane, the former chairman of Barclays and Aviva, is advising Revolut’s business in Australia, where the London-based company has already built a customer base of about one million since entering the market in 2020. The appointment, which is understood to be a modest part-time role, is nonetheless a notable signal of intent from a company that has made international scale central to its identity.

Revolut is Britain’s most valuable fintech and one of the country’s best-known technology exports. Founded by Nik Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko 11 years ago, it has grown from a payments and currency app into a sprawling financial platform spanning cards, transfers, crypto trading and, increasingly, regulated banking. The company was valued at $75 billion in a share sale last year and now counts about 75 million customers globally, a scale that places it well beyond the start-up phase and into the more complicated business of turning growth into durable institutions.

McFarlane’s involvement also says something about the sort of business Revolut intends to become. Storonsky has long spoken of his ambition to create “the world’s first truly global bank”, and the company’s appointment of a senior figure with deep experience in both Britain and Australia suggests it is seeking not merely market entry but local legitimacy. In financial services, where regulators and consumers alike remain sensitive to questions of governance, reputation and operational stability, such symbolism matters.

Australia is not a peripheral market for Revolut. The company has already amassed a meaningful customer base there and has earmarked the country for further growth. In February, it said it planned to invest almost A$400 million in its Australian operations over five years, a significant commitment that suggests the market is being treated as a strategic beachhead rather than a satellite outpost. That investment will need to support infrastructure, compliance, product development and, probably most importantly, trust.

McFarlane is well suited to that task. Scottish-born, 79, he spent much of his career in the upper reaches of international banking. He rose through the ranks at Citi, where he led the group’s operations in the UK and Ireland, before taking over as chief executive of Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, which he ran for a decade. During that period he acquired the nickname “Mack the Knife” for the severity of the restructuring measures he introduced, including a substantial reduction in the bank’s investment banking business. The label was not merely flippant. It captured a reputation for hard-edged management and an instinct for confronting unwieldy businesses with decisive interventions.

That reputation followed him back to Britain. He was on the board of Royal Bank of Scotland and played a role in the departure of Fred Goodwin as the lender came under taxpayer rescue in 2008. Later, as chairman of Aviva, he oversaw the removal of chief executive Andrew Moss in 2012. At Barclays, where he became chairman shortly before Antony Jenkins stepped down in 2015, he again presided over a leadership change. Jes Staley succeeded Jenkins and would himself later leave the bank in 2021 amid the scandal surrounding his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. McFarlane left Barclays in 2019 and returned to Australia, where he chaired Westpac until late 2023.

This record helps explain why Revolut has sought him out. The company may be one of the clearest success stories in British fintech, but its next phase is likely to be more demanding than the first. Expansion into banking introduces a different order of scrutiny. Growth in customer numbers and product breadth is only part of the equation; capital requirements, regulatory relationships, local market expertise and the quality of oversight become decisive. A company that began by outpacing traditional banks on speed and user experience must now prove that it can also operate with the discipline expected of a licensed financial institution.

The timing is important too. Revolut recently secured approval from UK regulators to start a bank in Britain, a milestone that is likely to underpin its next stage of development as it moves towards an eventual stock market listing, possibly in the United States. That makes the Australian business more than a regional venture. It forms part of a broader architecture for building a genuinely international bank, one that can operate across jurisdictions while retaining the nimbleness of a technology company. Whether that can be done without the compromises and frictions that have often slowed digital challengers is one of the defining questions around Revolut.

McFarlane’s role, according to a Revolut spokeswoman, is part of a wider practice of drawing on experienced industry figures on an ad hoc basis. She said: “Revolut works with a number of senior and experienced industry experts across the globe on an ad hoc basis. These advisers bring further insights and counsel to Revolut and our various boards.” The language suggests a flexible advisory model rather than a formal executive appointment, but that does not diminish its significance. In a company whose scale and ambition increasingly invite comparison with established banks, experience at the top table is not a decorative extra.

There is also a broader context to the appointment. Revolut’s rise has often been presented as emblematic of the British fintech boom, but the company itself has always been more global in outlook than many of its peers. Its customers are spread across numerous markets, and its most ambitious strategic moves increasingly reflect the logic of cross-border finance rather than any single national market. Australia, with its sophisticated banking system, high levels of digital adoption and long-standing links to British financial institutions, offers a useful testing ground for that model.

McFarlane’s own career gives the arrangement a certain symmetry. He is among the last generation of bankers whose influence extended across the square mile, Wall Street-style international banking and the major institutions of the Australian market. In that sense, he embodies the bridge between the old hierarchy of banking and the new, more fluid world in which technology firms aspire to become banks and banks try to behave more like technology firms. Revolut appears to be betting that, for all its digital instincts, it still needs the judgement of someone steeped in the orthodoxies of high finance.

The challenge for Storonsky and his team is to prove that such orthodoxies can be embraced without dulling the company’s edge. Revolut’s appeal has always rested partly on speed, design and a sense that it was built outside the traditions that have long governed the banking sector. Yet as it grows, the burden of proof shifts. Customers expect the convenience of a consumer app, regulators expect the reliability of a bank, and investors expect both with the addition of profit and scale. Bringing in someone like McFarlane does not resolve those tensions, but it does acknowledge them.

That acknowledgment may prove important as Revolut pushes deeper into markets where reputational capital counts for as much as product innovation. Australia is one such market, and McFarlane’s presence there is likely to be read as a reassurance to regulators, partners and perhaps institutional investors that the company recognises the seriousness of the undertaking. A fintech can grow quickly on engineering and branding alone; a bank, even a digital one, tends to require something harder to manufacture, namely authority.

For now, Revolut remains a private company with a valuation that places it among the most valuable technology businesses in Europe. But the path towards a public listing, and potentially one in the United States, will demand a more conventional kind of confidence from outsiders. Investors will want to know not only that customers are joining, but that the business can retain them, serve them across jurisdictions and satisfy supervisors in the process. Advisory appointments such as McFarlane’s do not settle those questions, but they indicate that the company understands the stakes.

Revolut’s supporters will argue that this is precisely the sort of evolution a successful fintech should undergo: first disrupt, then institutionalise. Its critics will note that the company has much to prove before it can be treated as a fully mature global bank. Both views can be true at once. What is clear is that by drawing in a figure like McFarlane, Revolut is signalling that the next phase of its growth will not be won by technology alone, but by the harder, slower business of earning trust in markets where scale is matched by scrutiny.