The challenger bank Revolut launched commission-free stock trading to U.S. users Wednesday, a major enhancement as it looks to become “all things money” for its users.
Revolut, which is based in London and has its U.S. headquarters in San Francisco, is adding retail trading to services including fee-free payments, crypto trading, two-day salary advances and other features it says will make it a “financial super app.”
Revolut, which says it has 18 million users internationally including more than 300,000 in the U.S., is set to further expand its list of services and step up its challenge to traditional banks. The statement from the company announcing the stock trading feature also said unsecured lines of credit are “on the horizon.” Revolut is
While some companies have built brands among consumers around one financial service or another — some big names are Fidelity for stock trading, Venmo for payments and Chase for banking — Revolut is doing all of the above and looking to offer more.
“Over the last 18 months, Revolut’s core focus in the U.S. has been to design an app that meets the financial needs of the modern U.S. consumer, and launching stock trading is the natural next step in this effort,” Nik Storonsky, Revolut co-founder and CEO, said in the statement. “Understanding stocks are serious financial investments, we’ve built an inclusive, user-friendly product that equips consumers with everything they need to trade with confidence.”
Revolut is not the only financial technology company expanding its service portfolio. Robinhood started out offering stock trading and has added cryptocurrency trading, debit cards and transactions at ATMs. Square’s Cash App started out with peer-to-peer payments and now offers stock and crypto trading.
“You look at a lot of our competitors out there and they’re starting to branch out — they started out really siloed in their product offering — but for many years now, Revolut has had this wide breadth,” said Gabriel Vallejo, who runs Revolut’s wealth and trading team in the U.S. The company already operates in Europe and has ported over many existing features to the U.S. market. “It’s not like it’s new for us to say we’re going to get into all these different spaces.”
Vallejo said the company will make money on the stock trading service the way some other commission-free trading apps do. Market makers will pay Revolut for real-time data about trades.
In the app, Revolut provides users with details on the more than 1,100 securities, including more than 200 exchange-traded funds, that they can trade in the app. These details include analyst ratings and price targets on individual stocks provided by Refinitiv.
For funds, in place of analyst ratings and price targets, the app shows market exposure broken down by country, holdings and sectors — information that Vallejo said can be hard to find in funds’ fact sheets.
“We really believe this is going to be an easy way for customers to understand: ‘What am I holding here? What’s in this basket?’ ” Vallejo said.
The app supports purchasing fractional or whole shares with market orders, limit orders or stop orders. Users can also see their order and transaction history for each security.
Vallejo said the rich information the app provides is one thing that makes the trading service stand out, but the company aims to package many such financial services — or, more to the point, all the services a user could need — to let users take care of all their finances in one place.
“While we worked really hard to build what we think is the most beautiful, most elegant, [most informative] trading app stand-alone, that value proposition is just part of the all-in-one package,” Vallejo said.
