Improving access to investment services across the EEA

Welcome back to the exclusive interview series from the Fintech Landscape in Lithuania 2021-2022 Report. In our third installment, Rolandas Juteika, CEO of Revolut Securities, talks about Rovolut’s recent financial broker’s license, Lithuania as a jurisdiction of choice and the vision for the future.

Revolut has recently received a financial broker’s license – how does that affect company’s wealth and trading services in the EEA?

The financial broker’s licence we’ve just received from the Bank of Lithuania allows us to offer our trading products to customers across the European Economic Area (EEA) directly from our European entity Revolut Securities UAB, and to continue our efforts at improving our value proposition.
This is another step not only in our mission to make financial services more inclusive, innovative and affordable to everyone, but also in building customer trust. We intend to make Revolut a daily financial partner that covers all customer needs – from banking and payments to saving and investing.

What made Lithuania your jurisdiction of choice? What are the benefits compared to other countries?

We are glad to be licensed here because it allows us to provide one of the most in-demand of Revolut’s services from Lithuania. After Brexit we had to choose a hub for our wealth and trading products in the EU. And since we are both a licensed bank and a licensed e-money institution here in Lithuania, which enables us to service all our EEA-based customers, applying for MiFID authorisation to complement those activities seemed like the natural next step.

Considering that you’ve already created a super-app, is wealth and trading going to play a more important role in your strategy?

We launched our stock trading service across the EEA in 2019, thereby prying open the notoriously insular, expensive, and complex stock market to an entirely new audience. We are now able to provide our customers with the opportunity to invest in the stocks of more than 900 global companies, and to trade in fractional shares (stock portions less than a full share), which is an appealing offer for low-stakes and novice investors. This service has become quite successful, attracting over 1 million customers across the EEA.

Our vision is to create a global super-app that would encompass all things finance (and beyond) within a single digital system. Wealth and trading are already an important part of our diversified offer. But I believe that we are only at the very beginning of our journey here as we continue to work on expanding our offer in the near future.