Revolut hires ex-Chase UK boss Kuba Fast to lead its European bank
The fintech has poached a senior operator straight from JPMorgan Chase to run the entity that holds its EU banking licence.
July 9, 2026 – 9:51 am
Revolut has appointed Kuba Fast, the former chief executive of Chase UK, to run Revolut Bank UAB, the Lithuania-based entity that holds the fintech’s European banking licence. The move hands one of the industry’s most closely watched digital lenders a senior operator taken directly from JPMorgan Chase, as it presses on with a banking build-out that recently earned it a UK banking licence after a three-year wait.
Fast will also serve as Revolut’s chief executive for Europe, replacing Joe Heneghan, who has held the role since 2021. The appointment was expected to take effect around the middle of 2026, pending sign-off from the European Central Bank and the Bank of Lithuania.
Registered in Lithuania, Revolut Bank UAB sits at the heart of the company’s continental operation, licensed and supervised by the ECB and the Bank of Lithuania. It operates across 30 markets in the European Economic Area, a footprint that has drawn scrutiny even as it grew, with European regulators previously curbing some of the bank’s riskier product launches.
The unit received a specialised bank licence in December 2018, began operating in 2020, and was handed a full banking licence by the ECB the following year.
Fast is a notable catch. He led Chase UK, JPMorgan’s British digital bank, along with JPMorgan Europe Limited, having become chief executive of the Chase operation in May 2024. He is leaving the American lender after seven years, a stint he described on LinkedIn as a “once-in-a-lifetime adventure: building a bank from a PowerPoint slide to an institution serving millions of customers in the UK.”
His career also reaches back into the region Revolut is chasing hardest. Before JPMorgan, Fast spent close to three years at the Polish digital lender mBank and six years at McKinsey & Company, a background across central and eastern Europe that Expansion reported would shape his remit.
The pitch, in Fast’s telling, is that the company still has room to grow despite its size. “Despite already being one of the largest retail banks in the EU by customer count, Revolut still has massive potential across customer growth, product expansion and relationship deepening,” he said, adding that it was “the first institution to achieve the holy grail of every digital banking effort I was part of: it truly masters cross-border banking at scale.”
That build-out is the strategic backdrop to the hire. Revolut secured its long-awaited UK banking licence earlier in 2026 and has been layering on products, from mortgages in Lithuania to wealth management, as it turns a payments app used by tens of millions into something closer to a full-service bank. Its EU entity, with roughly 700,000 customers in Lithuania alone, is central to that shift.
The change also lands at a moment of soaring expectations. Revolut has become Europe’s most valuable private tech firm, and founder Nik Storonsky has said an initial public offering is roughly two years out.