Digital banking giant Revolut has begun offering unsecured personal loans in the UK, Reuters has reported.

The move marks the company’s expansion into a consumer lending market dominated by the country’s largest banks.

Revolut’s UK chief executive, Francesca Carlesi, told Reuters that the move was intended to expand the neobank’s penetration as a primary bank, something digital-only operations have historically struggled with.

“We want to transition from being a very successful everyday spending app and disrupting the market, to become effectively the primary bank of choice for everybody in the UK,” ⁠Carlesi told the newswire.

The bank will also launch a credit card product in the near future, she said, as part of a more general effort to increase the revenue it generates from each individual customer, a metric in which it falls behind high street rivals.

Expanding into the personal loans sector places Revolut in more direct competition with banking majors such as NatWest, HSBC, Barclays and Lloyds, all of whom have decades of lending and operations experience in the country.

Without the data provided by longevity, Carlesi said that Revolut has supplemented its underwriting with information purchased from external providers, adding that it was confident in its credit analysis.

The bank will initially take a cautious approach to lending in the UK, Carlesi told Reuters, offering loans to a select group of customers before expanding to its 14 million UK customers over the coming months. It does not have a target for overall lending in the country, she added.

A Revolut spokesperson told the newswire that loans would range in value from £2,000 to £25,000, with rates between 6.9 per cent and 29.3 per cent.

Alongside this expansion, Revolut eventually plans to offer mortgages in the country, Carlesi added.

Revolut, Europe’s most valuable startup, has expanded rapidly this year, increasing offerings in countries across Europe, South America and Oceania. However, its rapid expansion has not been without teething problems.

In 2025, the European Central Bank temporarily curbed Revolut’s ability to launch new products in the region after identifying shortcomings in its approval process. Earlier this month, the bank was also among those most affected by an hours-long Google Cloud outage that left customers unable to pay or transfer money.

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