Key points
- Revolut’s July 22 secondary share sale values it near $115 billion, up from $75 billion in November, with a reported $150-200 billion IPO target.
- Plus500 (LON:PLUS) grew Q1 2026 revenue 18% while EBITDA rose 2%, the cost of buying growth from a single revenue line.
- Half of Plus500’s OTC revenue now comes from clients acquired over five years ago, against 24% three years earlier.
- Swissquote (SIX:SQN) earned more pre-tax profit in 2025 than Plus500 earned revenue, on a diversified bank structure.
- Revolut filed for a US national bank charter in March 2026 with $500 million committed, putting the same model in front of Robinhood (NASDAQ:HOOD) and the US brokerage complex.
In July, according to Bloomberg and Reuters, Revolut opened a secondary share sale at $2,017 a share, valuing the business at roughly $115 billion. That is more than Barclays, which carries a market capitalization around $94 billion. Reporting suggests a $150 billion to $200 billion target when it eventually lists, which will not be before 2028.
Meanwhile the companies whose customers it is quietly competing for trade on low teens earnings multiples. Plus500 has traded around a P/E in the 13 to 17 range this year, and the sector has re-rated upward through a strong first half.
Part of that gap is scale and growth. Part of it is something the sector’s current numbers are hiding.
I buy customers for regulated financial products for a living, so I read these annual reports as media plans rather than as valuation models. On that reading, the sector’s economics look strong and its 2031 economics look unresolved.
A low-teens multiple on a business generating 40%-plus margins is the market saying one of two things. Either it expects the current cycle to mean-revert, which is the standard read on leveraged trading volumes, or it is discounting something about the durability of the client base. The second factor deserves more weight than it gets, and the disclosure needed to price it does not yet exist.
The cycle is doing the sector a favor right now
Start with what is going well, because it is going very well.
The volatility wave through the start of 2026 has lifted the whole listed cohort. XTB (WSE:XTB) posted the most dramatic quarter: operating revenue up 88.5% year on year to PLN 1.09 billion, net profit up 176% to PLN 535 million, and 370,000 new clients added in three months. CMC Markets (LON:CMCX) pulled forward FY 2026 guidance to roughly 10% above the £353.9 million consensus and signed a white-label deal with Westpac it expects to add 40% to its Australian customer base. IG Group (LON:IGG) reported first trades up 63% year on year in the quarter to March 31.
Nothing on this dashboard is flashing red. That is exactly why the structural question gets postponed.
The margin scissors
Plus500’s Q1 2026: revenue up 18%, EBITDA up 2%. First half 2026: revenue up 12%, EBITDA up 1%. The company was explicit about the cause, adding about $16 million of customer acquisition spending in the quarter.
Unit acquisition cost is not the problem. Plus500’s average user acquisition cost was $1,196 in Q1 2026, down 1% year on year and down 5% on the quarter, against quarterly ARPU of $1,535. Over the full 2025 year, ARPU was $3,268 and acquisition cost fell more than 10%. That is competent operational work.
The problem is what growth costs in aggregate. Every incremental point of revenue is being bought, at four figures per client, out of a single revenue line.
Revolut’s acquisition math is not the same shape
Revolut’s 2025 report shows marketing investment up 47% year on year, across 41 above-the-line campaigns, 18 new airports in 11 countries, and title partnerships with an F1 team and Manchester City. It is not a company growing on word of mouth alone, despite the widely quoted figure that more than 63% of new retail customers arrive by referral.
Both facts matter together. Revolut pays to acquire a banking customer, then monetizes that customer across eleven product lines that each cleared £100 million in 2025: cards at 22.2% of revenue, interest 21.6%, subscriptions 15.7%, wealth 14.7%, FX 13.4%, on £50.2 billion of customer balances, roughly $66 billion.
Trading enters that calculation as upside on a number that already works. For a pure broker, trading is the whole number.
This stopped being theoretical during 2025. Revolut expanded CFD trading to 29 countries through its Bank of Lithuania brokerage, built on infrastructure from CMC Connect, the institutional arm of CMC Markets. On May 14, 2026 the FCA granted Revolut Trading a Variation of Permissions covering managing investments and dealing as principal, which is the license layer for leveraged products and managed portfolios. Revolut’s wealth line produced around £660 million of revenue in 2025, reported elsewhere at $876 million, up 31%. Plus500’s entire 2025 revenue was $792.4 million.
The product remains thin. No options, no futures, no mutual funds. That has never been the mechanism.
The same playbook is now aimed at the United States
In March 2026 Revolut filed an application with the OCC and the FDIC for a national bank charter, under the name Revolut Bank US, N.A. It has committed around $500 million to the US build over three to five years, and reporting points to a US bank launch in 2027. More than one million Americans already use the app through a partner bank arrangement.
Note what the charter is not for. Retail CFDs are not permitted in the United States, so this is not a leveraged products play. It is an application to own the customer relationship directly, and every product Revolut has layered onto that relationship in Europe becomes a candidate to layer onto it here.
The closest American comparison is Robinhood (NASDAQ:HOOD), which built a version of the same advantage from the opposite end: acquire cheaply through an app, then widen the product set. The sequence differs. Robinhood started with trading and added banking-style products. Revolut starts with the account. If distribution beats product, the second sequence is the stronger one, because a checking relationship gives someone a reason to open the app on a day when markets are quiet.
Two cautions against assuming this is automatic. Monzo withdrew from the US this year, and N26 exited earlier. Neither held a charter, and neither had eleven revenue lines to spread acquisition cost across.
The regulatory gate that only applies to one side
To advertise a CFD to a European retail client you need a local license, and then you need permission from the ad platforms. Belgium has banned distribution of these products to retail since 2016, binding on every passported firm. France prohibits electronic advertising under Sapin II. Spain since July 2023 bans marketing communications to retail or the general public, event sponsorship, use of public figures, call-center recruitment and per-client introducer payments.
Google requires separate certification for complex speculative financial products, country by country, and even certified ads serve with limited eligibility. From July 23, 2026, Google’s financial services advertiser verification became enforceable across 24 EEA markets, with a thirty-day window before financial ads are restricted.
Revolut’s airport and Formula One spending passes through none of these gates, because a current account is not a complex speculative product. The customer arrives for banking. The leveraged product is presented later, in-app, to someone already onboarded and funded.
Revolut is not exempt from product rules. ESMA leverage caps and negative balance protection apply to it identically, and it cannot sell CFDs to Belgian retail either. The asymmetry is in the route to the customer, not in the permission to sell.
For an investor, the practical translation is this: a regulatory tightening cycle in retail marketing raises the cost of growth for the pure brokers and leaves the balance-sheet competitor untouched.
Why the metrics look fine, seen from inside an acquisition team
Something here should bother anyone who has run a paid acquisition budget. When a competitor with effectively unlimited funding enters your market, you expect to see it in your costs. Auction density rises, CPMs inflate, cost per acquisition follows. That is the standard signature of a well-capitalized entrant.
It is not happening. Plus500’s falling acquisition cost is the evidence.
The reason is that Revolut is not in the auction. It does not bid on trading keywords, it does not buy comparison inventory, and it cannot push CFD creative through the ad platforms without the same certifications everyone else needs. Its distribution is an owned placement inside an app the customer already has. No second bidder, so no price signal.
What changes instead is the size of the addressable pool, and no acquisition dashboard measures that. Every system in use measures cost against the customers you did acquire. None can see the customer who opened a position inside a banking app two years before you would have bid for them.
Then the conversion asymmetry. In any regulated funnel the two largest drop-off points are identity verification and first deposit. An existing verified customer with money already on the account has cleared both before trading is mentioned. No creative, bid strategy or landing page work on the paid side closes that gap, because the gap is structural rather than executional.
Which is why payback period, not cost per acquisition, is the constraint that matters for a broker. A business recovering acquisition cost over six to twelve months can only grow as fast as its cash cycle allows. A business that amortized the same customer against a card product two years ago carries no such constraint on the trading line.
What the market already pays for the other structure
Swissquote (SIX:SQN) is the useful comparison because it resolved this a decade ago.
2025 net revenues CHF 723.3 million, pre-tax profit CHF 420.2 million, a pre-tax margin around 58%. Client assets CHF 88.7 billion, up 16.3%, on CHF 8.5 billion of net new money. Close to 1.2 million accounts.
Swissquote made more pre-tax profit than Plus500 made revenue.
It is a licensed bank running a brokerage, earning on interest, custody, FX, crypto and trading rather than on spread alone. And it owns Yuh, a consumer app that closed 2025 with 399,201 accounts, CHF 3.7 billion of client assets and a second consecutive profitable year. Yuh is an acquisition funnel feeding a brokerage, which is the Revolut motion, built deliberately by a firm that started on our side of the table.
The payment for order flow prohibition that became absolute across the EU on June 30, 2026 pushes in the same direction. Revenue has to migrate toward subscriptions, spreads, balances and interest. That favors whoever holds a banking license.
The disclosure that should be in every model
Plus500 published something last year that this sector almost never discloses. Approximately half of OTC revenue came from clients trading with the group for more than five years, against 24% three years earlier.
In the same year new sign-ups fell about 11% and active clients about 5%, while ARPU rose 8% to $3,268 and the average deposit per active client more than doubled to around $26,900.
An analyst reads that as quality of earnings, correctly. I read it as a media planner and see a business becoming more profitable as it becomes older. Revenue is a stock of long relationships, not a flow of new ones.
Which puts the 2031 revenue line in the hands of whoever opens an account in 2026.
Acquisition cost lands in the quarter you pay it. Value lands over five years, and so does the damage from never acquiring the client at all. That is why a cyclical boom is the worst possible environment in which to assess this risk.
Where Revolut is not the marginal bidder
Two honest qualifications, because the bear case is not total.
First, Poland. Revolut disclosed 590,000 Polish investment accounts in September 2025, ahead of every domestic brokerage but one. XTB still closed the year with 821,748 accounts after adding 441,500, roughly a third of all securities accounts registered with the central depository, growing faster than Revolut over the comparable period. Distribution is powerful and not decisive.
Second, the segment split.
IG earns around $3,240 per user, Plus500 $2,310, CMC $1,350, XTB about $350. Revolut competes hardest at the bottom of that range, for the low-deposit first account, and barely at all for the trader who searches out a platform by name and reads the swap table. XTB’s mass-market model, the one most exposed on paper, grew 88.5% last quarter.
What to watch in the next set of results
Four specific things, in order of how early they move.
The gap between revenue growth and EBITDA growth. Plus500 ran 18 points against 2 in Q1. If that spread persists across the cohort while revenue is strong, growth is being purchased rather than earned.
Acquisition cost disclosure. Plus500 publishes AUAC. Most peers do not. Absence of the metric during a marketing-led growth phase is itself information.
Cohort concentration. Plus500’s five-year revenue share is the most useful line any of these companies publishes. Watch whether it keeps rising, which would confirm that new cohorts are contributing less.
First-account share. Nobody discloses this and it is the number that matters: what proportion of newly funded clients are opening their first trading account anywhere, rather than switching. If super-app distribution is absorbing the entry point, that ratio moves first.
The question I cannot answer
I do not know how large this effect will be. Nobody does, because the 2026 cohort has not aged yet, and anyone claiming to have modeled it is selling something.
What I can say is where it will surface, and it is not in this quarter’s acquisition cost or next quarter’s guidance. It is in the five-year revenue line, some time around 2030, in a disclosure most of these companies do not currently make.
So the question for anyone holding these names through the cycle is narrow. If the cohort acquired in 2026 turns out to be smaller, or worse, than the cohort acquired in 2021, when does that become visible in the reported numbers, and which line shows it?
If the answer is 2031, the market is currently pricing four good quarters and ignoring a five-year question.
