Interactive Brokers Group vs Revolut Ltd.

Thomas Peterffy was born in Budapest in 1944 and emigrated to the United States in 1965 with $2,200 in savings. He taught himself English by watching TV and trained as a draftsman before teaching himself computer programming. In 1977, he bought a seat on the American Stock Exchange — at the time, options trading was dominated by human market makers shouting on the trading floor. Peterffy saw something others missed: options pricing was a mathematical problem, and computers were better at mathematics than human traders. He built his own pricing models and began trading.

In 1983, Peterffy built what may have been the first handheld computer used on an exchange trading floor — a device that calculated options prices in real time and fed them to his market-making team. Exchange rules required quotes to be delivered verbally; Peterffy's team used the computer to calculate prices and then shouted them out. The exchange eventually ruled that the device violated rules by displaying prices electronically; Peterffy challenged the ruling and ultimately convinced regulators that electronic pricing was the future of trading. The episode established the principle that would define Interactive Brokers: technology always beat human intuition in markets.

Peterffy's firm, Timber Hill, built one of the first fully automated, electronic market-making systems in the world, eliminating the need for human traders on the floor entirely. The system could process thousands of options contracts across hundreds of securities simultaneously, adjusting prices in milliseconds in response to market movement. The technology that other market participants found threatening, Peterffy pursued relentlessly. Interactive Brokers was founded in 1993 as the retail and institutional brokerage arm, offering access to markets globally through technology that had been developed for Timber Hill's own trading.

Interactive Brokers went public in May 2007 at a $10 billion valuation. The company had built something genuinely unique: a single brokerage account that provided access to stocks, options, futures, forex, bonds, and funds on over 150 markets in 33 countries and 25 currencies — more markets, more asset classes, and more technical sophistication than any retail or institutional competitor. Peterffy retained approximately 80% of the company after IPO, maintaining absolute control. The low commission structure and professional-grade tools attracted active traders, hedge funds, institutions, and quantitative firms who valued access over simplicity.

Interactive Brokers reported record revenues of $4.7 billion for fiscal year 2024, driven by rising interest income on client cash balances as interest rates rose. The company's market capitalisation exceeded $50 billion. In 2025, IBKR entered the prediction markets category with ForecastTrader — giving its professional client base access to event contracts alongside their existing multi-asset trading. Peterffy, now in his 80s, remained the company's controlling shareholder and philosophical anchor, still advocating for technology, low costs, and access over simplicity. The Hungarian immigrant who had arrived with $2,200 had built a $50 billion financial technology company.

Nikolay Storonsky founded Revolut in July 2015 after becoming frustrated with the foreign exchange fees charged by traditional banks. Storonsky, a former derivatives trader at Credit Suisse and Lehman Brothers, launched Revolut with a prepaid card that offered interbank exchange rates with no markup. The product launched at a London fintech event. Three thousand people signed up in the first day. Within a decade, Revolut would become the most valuable fintech startup in European history.

A 2018 Wired investigation described Revolut's internal culture as one of the most intense in British tech — with employees expected to work unpaid trial periods, leadership described as confrontational, and an obsession with metrics over wellbeing. Storonsky disputed many of the claims but acknowledged that Revolut's early culture had been built for speed over sustainability. The controversy prompted changes to HR practices but did not slow growth. Revolut reached 2 million users that year without a significant marketing budget.

Revolut raised funding at a $33 billion valuation in July 2021 — making it the most valuable private technology company in the United Kingdom. Simultaneously, its UK banking licence application stalled at the Financial Conduct Authority for over three years, with regulators reportedly concerned about corporate governance and financial controls. The wait became a symbol of European regulators' difficulty keeping pace with fast-growing fintech companies.

Revolut received its UK banking licence in July 2024 after a three-year wait. In November 2025, a secondary share sale valued the company at $75 billion — with Nvidia's venture arm among the new investors. Full-year 2025 revenue hit $6 billion, up 50% from 2024, with pre-tax profit of $2.3 billion. Revolut processed $1.7 trillion in transaction volume. The company had reached 70 million users globally — more than HSBC and Barclays.

In March 2026, Revolut filed for a U.S. national bank charter — a move that would allow it to offer insured deposits and lending to American customers directly. CEO Nikolay Storonsky told investors an IPO was "approximately two years away," with the company targeting a valuation of up to $200 billion when it eventually lists. The prepaid card that had launched to three thousand people in 2015 had become the foundation of one of the most ambitious financial services companies in the world.