Revolut at $115B Tops Barclays While Brokers Trade at 13x

Revolut's secondary share sale on July 22 priced the fintech at roughly $115 billion, a valuation that now exceeds Barclays' market capitalization of about $94 billion. The sale price of $2,017 per share was reported by Bloomberg and Reuters, with a listing reportedly targeted at $150-200 billion, although not before 2028. The new figure marks a sharp rise from the $75 billion valuation set in November.

The listed broker sector has been re-rating through a strong first half, but still trades at low-teens earnings multiples. XTB was the standout: operating revenue rose 88.5% year on year to PLN 1.09 billion, net profit jumped 176% to PLN 535 million, and it added 370,000 new clients in a quarter. CMC Markets raised its full-year guidance to about 10% above the £353.9 million consensus and announced a white-label deal with Westpac that should add 40% to its Australian customer base. IG Group reported first trades up 63%. Yet the cost of that growth is visible in Plus500's numbers: Q1 revenue grew 18% but EBITDA rose just 2%, and first-half revenue was up 12% with EBITDA up 1%.

Revolut's acquisition model is structurally different. It spent 47% more on marketing in 2025, but still says more than 63% of new retail customers arrive by referral. The bank monetizes accounts across 11 product lines, each above £100 million in revenue in 2025, including card payments, interest income, subscriptions, wealth and FX. Its wealth line generated roughly £660 million in 2025, up 31%, compared with Plus500's full-year 2025 revenue of $792.4 million. Revolut has also expanded CFD trading to 29 countries via its Lithuanian brokerage, and in May 2026 obtained FCA permissions to manage investments and deal as principal.

The same playbook is now targeting the US. Revolut filed for a national bank charter in March 2026 with the OCC and FDIC, committing around $500 million over three to five years. A US launch is expected in 2027, and over one million Americans already use the app through a partner bank. Unlike in Europe, this is not a leveraged-products play; it is about owning the customer relationship and later layering on additional products.

Regulation may reinforce the gap. European rules restrict how pure brokers can advertise CFDs — Belgium bans them entirely for retail, France prohibits electronic advertising, and Spain restricts marketing communications. Google's financial-services verification, enforceable across 24 EEA markets from July 23, 2026, adds another compliance layer. Revolut reaches customers through banking advertising, avoiding those gates.

Swissquote shows what a bank-broker hybrid can achieve: 2025 pre-tax profit of CHF 420.2 million on revenues of CHF 723.3 million, with client assets up 16.3% to CHF 88.7 billion. Its pre-tax profit exceeded Plus500's entire 2025 revenue. Meanwhile, Plus500's disclosure that roughly half of OTC revenue now comes from clients active for more than five years, versus 24% three years earlier, underscores how much the sector depends on older cohorts. New sign-ups fell 11% last year and active clients fell 5%, even as ARPU rose to $3,268 and average deposits per active client doubled to around $26,900. The 2026 cohort will not be fully visible in those numbers for years, which is why some investors fear the market is pricing a strong current cycle while ignoring a longer-term challenge to client acquisition.