Revolut to start offering mortgages to Irish customers as early as this year

Financial tech company Revolut could start offering mortgages to Irish users as soon as the end of this year in a major boost for prospective homeowners and mortgage switchers.

Revolut has long made known its intention to enter the Irish mortgage market in its quest to become a one-stop financial services provider — or a “super app” — going beyond its current offerings of payments services, crypto and stock trading and savings accounts.

At the end of last year, Revolut, which has more than three million customers in Ireland,confirmed plans to launch its mortgage product in Lithuania "followed by Ireland and France in 2025".

"The goal is to offer a fully digital mortgage product that is the fastest on the market, aiming to issue instant approval in principle and final offer in one business day subject to asset valuation and any necessary checks," Revolut announced at the company’s The Revolutionaries event in November.

Speaking to the Irish Times, Joe Heneghan, chief executive of Revolut Europe, said that the company expects to soft launch mortgages in Ireland as soon as the third quarter of this year for testing, before launching altogether toward the end of 2025.

“We think the mortgage process that customers go through at the moment [generally] is unwieldy and can be made a lot slicker,” Mr Heneghan told the newspaper.

Last year, Mr Heneghan said that the company's IT capability will be able to “make the customer journey a lot faster and a lot less onerous for the consumer” when compared to applying for a mortgage with a traditional Irish bank.

Revolut co-founder Nikolay Storonsky has previously said that customers will soon be able to apply for mortgages through the Revolut app, adding that the process would be much quicker than applying for a mortgage with a traditional bank.

“We will definitely do mortgages for consumers,” he told the Irish Independent’s Big Tech Show podcast back in 2022. “Because when I look at all the mortgage processes, it can take one to two months. At best, it’s seven days. It’s all quite ‘legacy’.”

Outlining how a Revolut mortgage would work, Storonsky explained: “It could be one of two models, or a combination.

“The first one is a mortgage financed by us as a bank. Or it could be like a mortgage introduction. But ultimately what we want to build is a frictionless experience that is 100 per cent digital, so that within the app you apply for the mortgage, select the house that you want to buy and then be emailed at the same time.

"Everything would be instant and automated.”

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