The Bank of Israel granted the Revolut Group a conditional licence on November 10 to establish a bank in the country, to be named Revolut Bank Israel (in formation), and issued a separate permit for control to the group’s controlling shareholder, Nikolay Storonsky. The bank has no customers and no announced opening date.
Conditional is doing real work in that sentence. The licence lets Revolut finish building an institution. It does not let the institution take deposits or lend. The central bank’s Banking Supervision Department will supervise the build and check the company against milestones it has set, and the restrictions attached to the licence are lifted only when those are met. The announcement did not say what the milestones are, which products the bank will sell, or what it will charge.
The approval followed a review by the supervision department in consultation with a licensing committee. It makes Revolut the third new bank licensed in Israel since December 2019. The four decades before that produced none.
That record is the one the supervisor chose to talk about on Tuesday.
Amir Yaron, the governor, said talks with Revolut’s leadership began at his initiative in late 2022, when he met executives in London and tried to persuade them to enter the Israeli market. “The completion of the review process for granting the banking license today brings things full circle,” he said. He added that adding players is the main route to more competition in the sector.
Daniel Hahiashvili, the supervisor of banks, said the licence came under a tiered process and a framework built for small, new banks. That framework is the part worth understanding. A tiered regime lets a supervisor admit an institution whose balance sheet and controls would not carry a full-service bank on day one, then widen its permissions as capital, systems and governance are demonstrated. The trade is speed of entry against scope of activity, and the supervisor keeps the option to stop widening it.
Restricted and phased banking licences have become a common way for regulators to let new entrants in without demanding a complete banking stack at the start. The design puts the difficult judgement in the middle of the process rather than at the door, which is also where the delay sits.
Revolut has been working toward this for more than a year. Calcalist reported in June 2025 that the company was discussing a lean bank structure with the central bank, one that would among other things allow it to take deposits. In May the central bank confirmed it had approved the company to proceed with the licensing process. Revolut already holds a separate licence from the Israel Securities Authority to provide payment services, and it renamed its local entity from Revolut Payments Israel to Revolut Bank Israel (in formation) in the days before the announcement.
The company says it serves more than 80 million customers worldwide.
The hiring pattern points at what the bank expects to do. Last month Calcalist reported recruitment in credit, risk management, compliance, collections and banking operations, five functions that matter to a lender and barely register at a payments app. Uri Nathan, formerly chief executive of Pepper, Bank Leumi’s digital banking brand, will run the bank. Shmuel Ben Zvi, known as Muli, has been appointed chairman.
Both men described the plan in the language new entrants always use. Nathan said the aim is to create genuine competition in the Israeli banking market through a digital financial services environment. Ben Zvi said the company is adapting Revolut’s international experience and capabilities to local requirements. The substance is in which capabilities travel.
Payments and foreign exchange are already licensed and operating. Deposits and credit bring capital requirements, liquidity rules and reporting obligations that a payments company does not carry, and those are precisely the parts a conditional licence defers. A bank that has not been cleared to hold customer balances is, for now, a payments company with a banking charter in a drawer.
Israel’s retail banking market is concentrated among a handful of groups, and the cost of holding an account has been a recurring subject in public debate for years, which is why the supervisor’s language about competition reads as more than courtesy. Two other digital banks have been licensed in the same period, One Zero and Esh, and the supervisors now have a comparison set: how quickly a licensed bank reaches operation, and what it does once it gets there.
Yaron’s account of the courtship is unusually specific. A central bank governor describing a four-year effort to persuade a foreign fintech to open a local bank is not the register regulators normally adopt, and it indicates how much of the policy is recruitment. The framework for small banks exists to make that recruitment possible.
Whether the framework works will be judged on the second and third bank, not the first.
For Revolut, the Israeli entity is small against its European business, and the licence is worth more as a precedent than as a market. A banking charter granted in a new jurisdiction under a framework designed for thin initial operations is a template the company can put in front of other supervisors. How that template is received depends on how the Israeli build goes, which puts weight on a subsidiary that will not move the group’s numbers for years.
The supervision department will say nothing about the milestones unless the company misses them badly enough to require action. The visible signals are therefore narrow: the first product the bank sells, the point at which deposit-taking is permitted, and whether the restrictions come off in one step or several.
There is also the question of what a lean bank is allowed to be. A small institution with outsourced infrastructure and a narrow product set is cheaper to supervise than a full-service bank and harder to compare with one. If the model spreads, supervisors will eventually need a way to describe what these banks do that does not borrow the language of the institutions they were meant to compete with.
Until then the licence is a permission to build. The building is the part that takes time, and it is the part no announcement can date.