Revolut has finally reported its 2021 accounts – but a tripling of turnover and first annual profit has been overshadowed by a report from its own auditor.
Turnover hit £636 million in 2021, up from £220m in 2020, thanks in part to the cryptocurrency boom. Crypto products brought in a third of those revenues.A £26.3m profit was a big improvement on the £223m loss from the previous year.
However BDO said it could not fully verify £477m of the 2021 revenues – including its foreign exchange and wealth department, which includes crypto – which means the turnover figure “may be materially misstated”.
Blamed by Revolut on IT glitches as its systems struggled to keep up with growth – it now claims these have been fixed – the issues meant the auditor was limited in its ability to detect “irregularities, including fraud”.
BDO had resorted to verifying cash balances and cash in client accounts, it said. However it had verified 100% of cash balances held on behalf of customers with third parties.
Revolut missed the September 2022 deadline for filing its accounts with Companies House then also missed an extended December deadline. Reports suggest that BDO, Revolut’s auditor since 2018, had been criticised by the accountancy regulator for the “unacceptable” quality of several of its audits at companies including Revolut.
Revenues increased over 30% to more than £850m in 2022, Revolut said in a statement, with customer numbers now at a huge 27m. Increased active retail customers, spend-per-user and paid plans contributed to its 2021 profitability, it said.
The crypto crash meant that area made up less than 10% of revenues in 2022.
“We have achieved our first full year of profit and shown that we can accelerate customer growth, at scale, and grow revenue across all of our product lines,” said CEO Nik Storonsky.
“In 2021 we were granted a full banking licence from the European Central Bank and welcomed millions of new customers. We also launched several new products and saw more activity from our customer base.”
Following the granting of a full European banking licence in 2021 by the European Central Bank, Revolut rolled out banking services to an additional 12 new countries in 2022, taking the total European countries serviced by the Revolut bank to 30. The FinTech says it is close to securing a UK banking licence which would enable it to hold deposits and make loans to consumers.
The number of employees at Revolut doubled in 2022 to more than 6,000.