Unsafe for whom?

After a health-tech dinner in Antwerp last month, six of us settled the bill in the time it took to find our coats. Nobody exchanged an IBAN. Someone said "I'll set up a group bill on Revolut", thumbs tapped in the candlelight, and the table was square before we reached the door. The paper letter my traditional bank sent me that same week, asking me to confirm a small change with a card reader, is still lying on my desk.

That small scene explains Europe's most valuable fintech better than any pitch deck. Revolut closed 2025 with €5.3bn in revenue and €2bn in pre-tax profit. It serves more than 70 million customers, and a share sale now values it at €101bn, ahead of Barclays and BNP Paribas. Venture investor Harry Stebbings calls it a "compound startup": roughly twenty products in flight at any moment, built by teams of eight to ten people, with a committee that kills the losers quickly. The sharpest reply under his post came from an operator who has clearly lived it: everyone copies the twenty-products part; the hard part they skip is killing eighteen of them fast.

Healthcare now has its own version. When French insurer Alan raised €480m at a €5.5bn valuation last week, Les Echos introduced it as "the Revolut of health". The parallel is earned. Alan has passed €800m in recurring revenue, growing 53% a year, is profitable in France, and serves 1.1 million members with roughly 850 staff. It calls its category "prevention insurance": cover, care navigation, prevention nudges and an AI health companion in one app, with reimbursements settled in minutes rather than weeks.

The reaction is the story

Challenger growth curves are impressive, but the more revealing data is how incumbents and their regulators respond. The CEO of Portugal's largest bank admitted this year that it had probably out-earned Revolut for the last time. Jamie Dimon name-checked the company in his shareholder letter as the kind of upstart that banks ignore too easily.

And the European Central Bank? It quietly restricted Revolut's European arm in July 2025, pausing new product launches until the company fixed "deficiencies" in its approval process. Staff had been encouraged to behave like "self-guided missiles", so that intervention reads like genuine prudential concern: a bank growing faster than its controls should worry everyone, customers first.

The UK tells a murkier story. Revolut waited four years for its full British banking licence, a delay its CEO blamed on regulators being too slow while incumbent banks quietly enjoyed the breathing room. The friction was the same; the beneficiaries were not. In March 2026 the licence finally arrived, and Revolut promptly filed for a US bank charter.

"This is unsafe for customers" and "this is unsafe for our margins" wear the same suit, and the tailoring is deliberate.

Healthcare's turn

In health insurance the vocabulary changes: "consumer protection" becomes "patient safety", and the incentive to blur genuine concern with turf defence grows stronger, because in healthcare the rules themselves are the moat. One analysis of the Alan deal describes European health-insurance regulation as "regulatory protectionism as a structural barrier to entry": the capital reserves and ACPR approvals that keep big tech out are exactly why an investor like Prosus must buy a pre-regulated insurer rather than build one. Alan understood this early. As one strategy account put it, it won by getting licensed, the one thing every rival refused to do. It holds the first new health-insurance licence granted in France since 1986.

Look underneath, though, and the challenger's real constraint isn't regulation at all. A close read of Alan's balance sheet shows its solvency coverage falling from over seven times the required minimum to roughly three and a half as the member base grew. Under Solvency II, every new member consumes capital. That's what last week's €480m round actually buys: reserves, not features. The same analysis carries a warning for anyone hiding behind the rulebook: regulation slows the imitators today, and it will slow them less every year.

Each player reads this moment differently. Incumbent insurers see a rival unburdened by legacy claims systems and forty-year-old core software. Regulators face a genuinely hard judgement, since the challenger's speed is both its value and its risk. Employers, who buy most of the cover, see a better renewal conversation. End-users enjoy a much better experience. Investors have already picked a side: they would rather buy the licensed challenger than fund a copy.

The smartest incumbents have stopped litigating and started rebuilding. Santander's Openbank is assembling the fintech experience on top of a bank balance sheet, and its payments chief, a former Revolut CIO, is blunt about the clock: "every year that passes, the situation is worse" for those who wait.

So here's a test you can run on any objection an incumbent raises against a challenger. A genuine safety concern tends to arrive with a path to compliance attached, because the objector actually wants the risk fixed. A defensive one tends to arrive with a prohibition, because the objector wants the rival gone. The ECB told Revolut what to fix and let it carry on. The louder voices just wanted it stopped.

This week, take the loudest "safety" objection in your own sector, in healthcare or beyond, and ask whose safety it actually protects. If the honest answer includes margins, the clock is already running.

💥 May this inspire you to read the next "consumer protection" objection twice.