Open Revolut and Wise on a phone today and the two apps look almost identical. Both give you local account details, a debit card, currency exchange, and a place to hold cash. Both started in London and grew into two of the largest financial technology companies in Europe.
When I read their latest annual reports side by side, the similarity disappeared. Wise is a money-transfer network that added an account and a card. Revolut is a bank app that added transfers. That single difference explains how each company makes money. It also explains where each can pay out inside a country, and why neither simply copies the other.
Revolut is bigger, while Wise moves the cross-border volume
We now have full annual numbers for both companies, for periods that overlap by nine months. Revolut reports on calendar year 2025 in its 2025 annual report. Wise reports on the twelve months from April 2025 to March 2026 in its Financial Year 2026 results, published on 25 June 2026.
| Metric | Revolut | Wise |
|---|---|---|
| Reporting period | Calendar 2025 | April 2025 to March 2026 |
| Revenue | $6.0bn, or £4.5bn, up 46% | $2.5bn net revenue, up 19% |
| Profit before tax | $2.3bn, or £1.7bn | $0.66bn |
| Profit margin before tax | 38% | 26% |
| Customers | 68.3m retail and 767k business | 18.9m active |
| Biggest revenue line | Card payments at 22% | Cross-border transfers at 50% |
| Cross-border money moved | Unreported | $243.5bn at an average 0.52% fee |
The customer totals do not measure the same thing. Revolut counts total retail customers and business accounts. Wise counts only active customers who used the service during the period. Even with that caveat, Revolut is more than twice Wise’s size by revenue and more than three times its size by pre-tax profit.
Yet Wise moved $243.5bn across borders at an average fee of 0.52%. Revolut does not report its cross-border transfer volume at all.
Wise earns more from moving money abroad, with a quarter of the customers
Note 6 of the Revolut annual report breaks down fee income by type. Combining that breakdown with Wise’s results shows what actually pays the bills at each company.
| Revenue source | Revolut share | Revolut amount | Wise share | Wise amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Moving and exchanging money | 13% | £606m exchange fees | 50% | $1.26bn cross-border fees |
| Cards | 22% | £1.00bn | 25% | $637m card and other |
| Interest on customer money | 22% | £974m gross | 24% | $609m net of interest paid out |
| Subscriptions | 16% | £708m | None | None |
| Investing and savings products | 15% | £663m | Inside card and other | Inside card and other |
| Rewards and other | 12% | £560m | Inside card and other | Inside card and other |
Look closely at the top row. Moving and exchanging money is half of Wise’s business. At Revolut, it is 13% of revenue.
In dollars, Wise earns about $1.26bn from cross-border fees alone. Revolut earns about $0.8bn from all exchange fees combined, which includes card spending abroad. Wise earns more from moving money than Revolut does, with about a quarter of Revolut’s customer count.
Revolut makes its money like a modern retail bank. Cards and interest on customer balances are tied as its largest revenue lines at 22% each. Paid subscription plans bring in another 16%, and investing and savings products add 15%. Wise has no subscription line, and it reports investing inside its card and other line.
Wise built payment plumbing while Revolut built a bank
The revenue split follows directly from what each company built underneath the app.
Wise built a payout network country by country. It holds local money in accounts inside each country. In some countries, it connects directly to the national payment system. In its FY2026 year, Wise added direct connections in Brazil and Japan. It also gained new licences in South Africa, the UAE and Thailand. 75% of Wise payments in the last quarter arrived in under 20 seconds.
Wise also rents this network to traditional banks under the name Wise Platform. UniCredit, Raiffeisen Bank, MBSB Bank and Capitec signed up in the last year.
Revolut took a different path. It built licences to run a full bank app country by country. As FXC Intelligence notes in its coverage of the 2025 results, Revolut now holds a full UK banking licence and runs a bank in the EU from Lithuania.
For payouts, Revolut pays out locally where it holds its own account or a partner’s account in the local payment system. This covers major flows such as GBP, EUR, USD to the US, AUD and SGD. However, Revolut’s developer documentation for creating a counterparty lists local bank details for only six places: the UK, the SEPA countries, the US, Australia, India and Mexico. Everywhere else, Revolut sends money by SWIFT. On a SWIFT transfer, intermediary banks along the way can take a fee from the amount before it arrives.
The economics keep each company in its lane
People often ask why Revolut does not build its own local payout rails everywhere, or why Wise does not turn into a full bank. The economics of each business push against that.
For Revolut, building a Wise-style network is expensive. Doing so requires holding local money and getting regulatory licences in every individual country. That investment only pays off when a company has heavy money flows going both ways across every corridor. Revolut’s profit comes from 68.3m retail customers using cards, paid plans and savings products. So Revolut builds local payouts where those core customers already live and spend.
For Wise, the network is the product. Wise’s average cross-border fee fell from 0.58% to 0.52% in a single year while its transfer volume grew 31%. Lower prices bring in more volume, and that volume pays for the fixed cost of the network.
That focus also protects Wise’s wholesale business. Wise can sell Wise Platform to banks because Wise focuses on transfers. Traditional banks would be much less likely to rent their payment plumbing from Revolut, because Revolut competes directly with them for primary bank customers.
They overlap on the surface and diverge at the edges
The two apps are still growing into each other’s territory. Wise added a multi-currency account, a debit card and investing features. It says almost half its revenue now comes from outside cross-border fees. Both companies now earn between a fifth and a quarter of their total revenue from interest on customer money. Meanwhile, Revolut’s exchange fees grew 43% in 2025.
For holding balances in major currencies or spending on a card, the two products feel very similar. The difference shows most when money leaves the big currencies. There, Wise uses its own local accounts, while Revolut falls back to SWIFT.