Revolut wins a full Colombian banking licence, its sixth banking licence worldwide

Colombia's Superintendencia Financiera de Colombia granted Revolut a full banking licence, the last regulatory step before it can launch in the market. The authorisation lets Revolut operate as a regulated bank, with deposits covered by Colombia's Fogafin insurance scheme, and the company points at remittances and cross-border money management as the products it will lead with.

About 200,000 Colombians are on the waitlist ahead of launch. It is Revolut's sixth banking licence globally, alongside the UK, France and Lithuania among others, and continues a run of licensing across Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and the US over the past year.

For the European acceptance corpus this is context rather than consequence: it changes nothing a European merchant pays or accepts. What it tracks is the funding of Revolut's European ambitions - the group has been converting itself from an e-money passporting model into a set of local banking licences, and each one adds a deposit base and a domestic rail it can price against incumbents on.

Remittances and cross-border are the stated wedge, and a Colombian licence paired with the European ones puts Revolut on both ends of one of Europe's larger outbound remittance corridors rather than only the sending side. The relevance to acceptance stays indirect until the group pushes merchant acquiring in a new market off the back of one of these licences, which is the pattern worth watching rather than this event.

• When Revolut actually launches in Colombia and whether the 200,000-strong waitlist converts
• Whether merchant acquiring follows the licence there as it has in parts of Europe
• And, the European question, whether the licensing run continues into further EU markets or consolidates onto the existing French and Lithuanian entities

• thepaypers.com