Tech, Business, Finance and Everything Else
Its pretty amazing to see. Revolut ads are starting to take over an airport near you. These positions used to be controlled by HSBC, but it really does feel like the world is changing in banking – and we are finally getting a good product.
Revolut has achieved a remarkable milestone: it is now the largest bank in Lithuania by assets, just five years after securing its license there. According to the central bank, Revolut now commands 30.8% of the Lithuanian market, overtaking long-time leaders Swedbank (24.4%), SEB (19.6%), Luminor (10.5%) and the recently rebranded Artea (6.6%).
Licensed in Lithuania but serving 50 million customers across 30 EEA countries, Revolut has rapidly grown its local footprint with more than 650,000 Lithuanian clients. In 2024 alone, retail customers grew 24%, business clients 57%, and youth accounts 47%. This year, Revolut also entered the housing loan market, further cementing its presence alongside its full suite of digital banking, credit, investment, and savings products.
David Vélez, Nubank’s CEO and co-founder, just sold 33 million Class A shares (around 0.7% of the company’s total shares) through Rua California Ltd. He said it was for personal asset planning—about 3.5% of his stake.
via Reuters.
South Korea’s KakaoBank has acquired a 10% stake in Indonesia’s Superbank, a digital bank backed by Grab and Singapore Telecommunications. This investment marks KakaoBank’s first overseas expansion and is expected to strengthen the bank’s position in the Southeast Asian market.
KakaoBank is known for its innovative digital banking products and services, and it is expected to bring its expertise to Superbank to help it grow its business and reach more customers in Indonesia. The investment is also seen as a sign of KakaoBank’s confidence in the Indonesian market, which is one of the largest and fastest-growing digital economies in the world.
NuBank (Nu Holdings) is pushing the banking industry in Brazil, Mexico and Colombia.
I have been wanting to invest in NuBank for some time, but I have thought for the past year or so – that their market cap has become so large that they are simply just un-investable at these levels.
To prove this was the case I thought I would do a very simple side by side comparison with a legacy bank that is predominantly in key markets.
| Metric | Nu Holdings | Barclays |
|---|---|---|
| Assets Under Management | $10.2B | $2.3T |
| Number of Customers | 30M | 48M |
| Revenues | $1.2B | $25.4B |
| EBITDA | $-78M | $9.3B |
| Countries | 3 | 50 |
| Market Cap | $35 billion | $28 billion |
I know NuBank is in 3 emerging markets – with at least 200 million people in those countries that are currently unbanked. However, even if NuBank was able to have 100 million customers – expand their product lines and then start to really focus on other markets – do you think they can really grow to the AUM or sheer network size of Barclays?
Or is this a perfect short sell position?
A lot of people are talking about Banks at present with the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and others.
The banking sector is always an interesting topic and they are actually very interesting businesses.
They are in the business of using other people’s money to generate more money and try to add value through different services. If everyone takes their money out of a bank all at the same time – then all the banks in the world don’t have enough reserves to cover this.
However, with the death of the local branch – it seems now there is a growing opportunity for banks to slim down their staffing requirements, capital expenditures and simply products and services to focus on value driven opportunities.
It will be interesting in the coming months if there are any more banking collapses, but its an industry that is going to be heavily upset by the new online only banks focused on a much wider variety of services – at a fraction of the high street bank prices.