Popular neobank Revolut has expanded its investing offering in the UK.
As a consequence, you can now quickly access global markets and asset classes on the platform via Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). You can also tuck up your investments inside the cosy tax-free confines of a stocks and shares ISA. There’s lovely.
These welcome moves come on top of Revolut’s existing range of shares, precious metals, and crypto tokens.
More is always definitely more. If not always, contrary to popular opinion, ‘the merrier’. (Invite TI to a party and find out.)
So while we’re always happy to see new options, we must ask: is Revolut good for investing? Whether you’re an existing user or thinking of becoming one?
Let’s dive in.
Investing with Revolut
Revolut Invest is an app-only experience. And a very attractive, streamlined app it is too. It’ll take you all of about ten minutes to get the hang of the investment features. Albeit that’s mostly because there aren’t many.
Here’s what you can do…
Invest in US, UK, and European Economic Area stocks
There are over 4,000 shares to choose from. Though relatively few are priced in pounds – and that will matter when we come to the fees.
Trade a range of 161 ETFs
That’s not many, especially when many of them are priced in euros. (Currency exchange fee alert!)
Stock up on precious metals
There’s gold, silver, platinum, and even palladium if you fancy it.
These aren’t ETCs.1 You’re buying physical quantities of shiny metals as expressed in troy ounces.
Sadly, you can’t take delivery of the bars nor see a photo of your personal treasure chest. But you can pay a mate in gold – if they’re also a Revolut customer. This may get expensive.
The crypto service isn’t contained within the investing section of the app. That’s because crypto is not an investment! [Hollers into the void / at his own co-blogger.]
How much does Revolut investing cost?
Okay, it couldn’t be simpler. Ahem. [Draws a deep breath.]
| Plan | Annual price (£) | Free trades | Trade fee (%) | FX fee (%) |
| Standard | 0 | 1 | 0.25 | 1 |
| Plus | 47.88 | 3 | 0.25 | 0.5 |
| Premium | 95.88 | 5 | 0.25 | 0 |
| Metal | 179.88 | 10 | 0.25 | 0 |
| Ultra | 540 | 10 | 0.12 | 0 |
You pay the trade fee once you’ve used up your free trades for the month. The fee is levied on the value of each order.
For example, a £1,000 trade incurs a £2.50 fee – once your free trade allowance is exhausted.
For £180 a year, you can be a Trading Pro. This tier grafts on to your existing plan and reduces your trading fee to 0.12%. It also bestows other benefits like Level 2 market data and the ability to trade up to $250,000 a throw on US stocks. Handy, for someone I’m sure.
FX fees
FX fees apply only when you breach your monthly currency exchange allowance.
The allowance per plan is:
- Standard: £1,000
- Plus: £3,000
- Other plans: No FX charges
Want to exchange currency at the weekend? That’s an extra 1% (Standard) and 0.5% (Plus) on top of the FX fee detailed above.
Your monthly allowance does not apply at the weekends. It must be visiting its nan.
Precious metals fees
Standard or Plus: 0.99% of the trade’s value or £1 – whichever is higher
Other plans: 0.49% of the trade’s value or £1 – whichever is higher
And…
Revolut’s spread.
And…
The FX fees as explained above.
This can all mount up.
Other fees
Do note that these plans also cover Revolut’s broader range of services, beyond investing.
Set against that, there are extra banking fees to think about if you’re considering Revolut. They may not be what you’re used to. (Look out for the cashpoint withdrawal charges!)
How do Revolut’s investing fees compare?
You can invest more cheaply elsewhere, even if you’re a Revolut customer paying into a plan already.
Trading 212 (affiliate link) and Lightyear are app-first investment platforms that offer stocks and ETFs for a keen fee. They’re both so-called zero commission brokers and their FX charges are lower than Revolut’s.
InvestEngine focuses purely on ETFs and has also eliminated trade fees and platform costs for DIY investors.
Check out our broker comparison table for more options. And this is how to smash your investment FX fees.
What if I want to pay a fee?
Many investors worry that the zero commission broker business model could be unsustainable. If that’s you then Revolut’s Standard and Plus plans look reasonable value – provided you can avoid racking up trading charges.
You could, for example, pound cost average into one GBP-priced ETF per month on the Standard Plan. Fees incurred: £0 per month.
However, the Premium Plan et al look expensive if purely chosen for investing services.
What investment account types does Revolut offer?
Revolut provides two types of investment account:
- Stocks and shares ISA
- General Investment Account (GIA)
The Stocks and Shares ISA is flexible. Revolut doesn’t offer JISAs or pensions.
You can’t transfer into the stocks and shares ISA. (Yet.)
Transfers out are cash only.
That is, you’ll need to sell your investments (potentially incurring fees) and spend time in cash and out of the market if you want away from Revolut. Exit fees do not apply.
It looks like you can transfer in General Investment Accounts2 from some brokers.
The minimum order value is one pound, dollar, or euro, depending upon which currency you’re trading in.
You can hold fractional shares for stocks but there’s no mention of whether the same is true for ETFs.
Finally, customer service is chat-only. Forget telephones.
Is Revolut safe for investing?
If Revolut went bust and the value of your stocks or ETFs was irrecoverable, then you’d be covered by the UK Financial Conduct Authority’s Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS).
In a nutshell, the scheme is designed to pay out up to £85,000 per person if your FCA authorised investment platform fails.
Revolut says its investing service is protected by the FSCS scheme.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Firm Reference Number (FRN) is 933846 for the investment arm of Revolut.
Precious metals are a different matter: they’re unregulated. FSCS compensation does not apply. Other FCA regulations do not apply. Moreover, Revolut states the Financial Ombudsman probably wouldn’t step in if you had a complaint.
Read the Risks section of this terms and conditions page before you invest in precious metals with Revolut.
Cash isn’t FSCS protected either.
Is Revolut good for ETF investing?
The ETF range is limited at the moment. In my opinion it’s not very well curated.
Many funds are priced in Euros. That isn’t ideal if you’re keen to avoid FX fee entanglements.
Precious metal ETCs are entirely missing. This prevents you from investing in gold holdings that can benefit from FSCS protection. (I don’t suppose that’s because Revolut would rather not cannibalise its precious metals business, huh?)
You can put together a reasonably-priced passive portfolio with the ETFs available. But many categories are only represented by one GBP-priced fund. And some sub-asset classes are missing altogether.
Searching for ETFs is also finickity.
Granted, they all appear as a big long list in an obvious place. But the only way to filter is by popping your best taxonomic guess into the search field – which is hit-and-miss.
For instance, the term ‘Emerging Markets’ elicited only euro-priced ETFs. The GBP-priced versions didn’t show up, because they were tagged with the infinitely cooler-sounding ‘EM’.
Meanwhile, the term ‘bonds’ snubbed ETFs identifying as gilts. And so on.
Given the app’s general slickness, its ETF-tracing powers seem unnecessarily cumbersome. Perhaps that will change with future updates.
In other news, there’s no regular investing plan. Though those wily European Revolut customers have one, so maybe this feature will come to Blighty one day, too.
Finally, there’s very little on the investor education side. Happily though you can get that from Monevator. Start with this piece on passive investing and this one featuring low-cost ETFs.
Revolut investing review summary
Revolut offers existing customers an easy pathway into investing. However, cheaper, better-featured alternatives are available from the dedicated investment platforms.
Pros
- Clean and navigable app that doesn’t overwhelm
- Straightforward if you’re an existing customer
- Low minimum order value
Cons
- Limited range of ETFs
- Complicated fee structure
- Unregulated precious metals offering
- Can’t transfer ISAs in. Can only transfer out in cash
Trustpilot review score: 4.5 (but most reviewers are commenting on Revolut’s banking services.)
Take it steady,
The Accumulator
Does “stocks and ETF monies” just mean cash in your account you were planning on buying ETFs with?
No thanks. There’s nothing there that would tempt me to move away from A J Bell and Invest Engine. In addition, it seems to me that Revolut’s difficulties in regulatory areas have been due to what I viewed as it’s somewhat murky ownership. Who exactly are they? But hey, who’s bothered when there’s lots of whizbang and glitz?
I am.
In fact, with all the hacking, and outages, and fintechs of this and that whose apps look great until you have cause to try to use their customer service…, I’m very much reviewing my present and long time banking choices. Time was, actually a few short years ago, from my small rural town, I could access 6 bank branches within a 3 mile radius. Now, there are none inside 20 miles in any direction.
Except for one. The Nationwide. I think I’ll be saying hello to them quite soon.
Sorry @TI, to drift well off topic, but the more I see of the likes of Revolut, and Monzo etc, when the sh*t hits the fan in some kind of crypto GFC, I’d like to be somewhere grounded.
Worth mentioning that Revolut Metal comes with significant “partnership” benefits, including subscriptions to FT online, Perplexity Pro and NordVPN! I subscribe to it for that reason alone. Just the FT subscription is enough to make it worthwhile.
More detailed notes from the small print: I think they offer a “monthly” quote, but you are basically committing to it for a whole year so you may as well pay the annual fee. And in theory none of the partner benefits are guaranteed, ie they could be pulled at any time. Do your own research and decide on your own risk preference for these details.
@Jdoley – I meant the value of your investments (but not the precious metals). I’ve edited the piece to make this clear.
@Southbank – nice benefits. Cheers!
I’m already a metal customer for their travel insurance and other perks (though a bit miffed last year when they axed the previous travel insurance on Premium and shortened trip duration).
Generally I’ve been very happy with Revolut which I got originally for travel money and am now running more day to day out of pocket UK spend through it mainly for the ease of tracking. Customer service has got worse but they can generally sort stuff out in a couple of days.
Haven’t strayed into their investment offerings yet though can see I might be encouraged more heavily as they see a standard £200 going out from them to Investengine every month (not my only GIA investment but just a habit I was trying to establish).
@TA Sorry, I’m more confused now.
Been reading up on FCSC protection. Trying to figure out whether it’s worth worrying about with the newer 0% platforms – InvestEngine, Trading212, Lightyear and now Revolut where mostly it’s only ETFs or stocks you can buy
Are these outdated?
https://monevator.com/maximising-fscs-protection-for-your-investment-portfolio/
https://monevator.com/investor-compensation-scheme/
So basically if the assets were ringfenced properly you’d be fine. But if they weren’t due to mismanagement you’d not be covered for ETFs (unless missold due to advice by the provider), is that right?
I love my Revolut card for holidays and foreign trips, I’m still a bit gutted I didn’t get shares when there was a funding Round early on. I offered £5k but the allocation went to more “senior” card holders, ie fee paying.
My current bank Lloyds charge about £30 pcm and I get some good freebies, inc 60 day travel insurance – which is quite rare. It cost £400 one year to upgrade to a 90 day trip!
Anyway, my point, interesting t&c on Revolut’s travel policy – all claims excluded unless you paid at least 75% of the trip cost on your Revolut card. Now that sounds unreasonable and easily missed.
@Boltt – yeah that 75% is a bit of a gotcha but practically only usually means remembering to put flight/ferry costs through it rather than credit card given that I’ll usually be paying local accommodation and prebooked things in local currency on it anyway.
Considering Nationwide Flexplus as an alternate travel insurance but wintersports isn’t quite as good last time I looked.
Competition is great and to be encouraged but……
The primary duty of an investor is to make sure as far as he can that the investment companies that he has chosen for his precious monies are “safe”
Pension savings especially are a very long term play and you need to be sure as much as possible that your chosen investment companies are functioning 30-40 years down the road-that’s a big call
Personally as a small amateur investor I would stick to the big boys -Vanguard,Blackrock etc and let these new guys on the block establish financial/investment trust via those investors with deeper pockets and more investment ability than me in what appears to be so far a worthwhile addition to the investment market
xxd09
Good review @TA, thanks
Agree with @Southbank, the FT subscription alone can justify Metal or Ultra
Metal £14.99 per month vs £39 for FT standard digital
Ultra £45 per month vs £59 for FT digital premium
I went Ultra purely for premium FT, haven’t tried half the perks like airport lounges or travel insurance but find the app itself great. Much less friction than mainstream bank’s apps and good capabilities.
Seems like the investment account could be particularly useful for some ISA money if one was active with non GBP stocks given no dealing or FX fees if you stay within the 10 trades a month. Sorting out transfers in seems a rather important step if they want to attract any assets!
Airport lounges aren’t great given its the pay lounge Priority Pass offerings hence overcrowded and far from premium but you can usually neck a few drinks and carry out a coke or bottle of water to more than breakeven vs eating in terminal.
Well I’ve been spurred to register for investment to check out the ETFs – you can at least buy VWRL.
@Jdoley – you’re covered for £85K if the broker goes bust and there’s a shortfall between remaining assets and your investment account balance (not including precious metals).
Re: ETFs and funds – I think you may be referring to a separate part of the FSCS scheme. In this case, you’re also covered for £85K if your fund provider goes down – subject to the terms of the scheme e.g. UK domiciled funds.
ETFs are not covered by the FSCS scheme because they’re not domiciled in the UK.
If Revolut goes belly up you’re covered for a shortfall of up to £85k in your investment account insofar as that’s composed of stocks and ETFs.
Confusion may be creeping in because the FSCS scheme only covers you if the FCA regulate your broker for certain activities. In this case, the stocks and ETFs are within scope and covered by the compensation scheme. The precious metals and crypto are not.
Cash is covered by yet another part of the scheme. It’s best to read Revolut’s explanation of the circumstances in which cash is covered i.e. when they hand it off to a bank with deposit protection.
Re: your broader question. The recommended practice is to email the broker in question and ask them to specifically confirm they are covered by the FSCS for investments in the specific securities you care about e.g. ETFs and stocks.
Hope that helps. Those articles are up to date IIRC. It’s just a bit of a minefield.
Thanks for the summary. My issue with Revolut is that they tend to change terms quite frequently, something I have experienced with FX and to a lesser extent crypto. I tend to prefer Interactive Brokers. They tend to have however larger capital requirements to make it worthwhile. I believe that IB also offers ISA now and it has a large array of ETFs to choose from (should ETFs be what you want to invest in).
@TA thanks. Appreciate it, definitely a minefield!
> That’s because crypto is not an investment!
I can see where you’re going with that, though philosophically you’d also have to exclude FX and the precious metals such as gold that don’t have an industrial application 😉 That’ll be the Warren Buffet approach to asset classes, deadbeats are “neither of much use nor procreative”. I salute your purity of purpose and don’t let that TI fellow get you down!
I’m kinda with Trufflehunt #2 and xxd09 #9. I tend to associate complex bundled offers and perks with rapidly varying Ts and Cs with shysters but good luck to y’all, some folk with more energy than I get a rush from the optimisation game 😉
Revolut is app-only, which I don’t like. I run GrapheneOS, which is a security-enhanced, degoogled version of Android that strips out all the Google components. Apps are normally 100% compatible as it’s still just Android. But Revolut has now several times pushed an update that blocked “non-Google” Android. The problem is that there’s no way to know when this happens and there’s nothing you can do about it. There’s no online banking in the browser. There’s no app for a PC. There’s no branches. The “support” just tells you to buy a new iPhone or something.
@Ermine – “I salute your purity of purpose and don’t let that TI fellow get you down!” Love it! 🙂
As a rule of thumb, I agree with you re: bundled offers. That said, I was vaguely thinking about a FT subscription so I see where AoI and Southbank are coming from. Your optimisation comment made me smile too. Can just imagine forcing down another article about Goldman Sachs’ profits just to get my money’s worth 😉
The English Investor – thank you for your thoughts 🙂 You’re right, IB do have an ISA. Many readers speak highly of IB but it just seems so complex to me. Maybe not as bad as it looks?
@TA Interactive Brokers is definitely an acquired taste and tailored to the “prosumer” end of the market, but they’re great for the sheer range of financial instruments and the very low fees. Although their Trader Work Station is extremely complex and not at all user friendly, I almost always use their web or mobile app now and that’s pretty easy to use.
I may be an edge case (ex UK, with lots of SGD and USD needs) but IBKR definitely has its place and is incredibly useful for currency exchange (limit orders, watchlists etc), fixed income (complete US-T and gilts along with bond funds), and naughtier stuff (options & cr*pto).
Transferring funds in/out is a bit fiddly, and their trading interface is definitely an a acquired taste but it works for me. I’ve kept Revolut Premium as well more for the ancillary benefits (perplexity pro, kids accts, and general foreign spend). Each has their place.
Edit to add: IBKR pays interest on cash held in the brokerage accounts, it’s been pretty competitive to date as well and saves me from chasing rates / bonus savers.
Excellent review. Thanks U @TA.
Echoing / elaborating on @Southbank, @AoI: perhaps Revolut sells itself on the ‘freebies’ if you want a ‘fun account’ (e.g. 5% in a side portfolio) to relieve an active investing itch.
Metal (£14.99) might be the sweet spot for FT digital standard (£39), Nord (£10 stand alone), Perplexity Pro (£19.49) and WeWork day pass (from £25) pcm.
IMO everyone should have a VPN, although there’s cheaper options than Nord (which is highly rated though).
20 years ago I used to be able to pick up paper copies of the FT on the way into work at a special discount price of 25p/40p from the SU shop on the LSE campus (limited no’s, 1st come 1st served). It was a fantastic resource. Could not justify £39/£59 pcm now though (for digital only), but for £14.99 it’s a different matter. I think @TI has mentioned before being an FT premium digital subscriber, so maybe he’s got a view on whether the upgrade from standard is worth it, which in turn might impact the attractiveness of Revolut Ultra over Metal.
On the Perplexity tie in with Revolut, I use the free tier of Gemini, Chat GPT, Grok (yes I know), Claude and Perplexity for brainstorming / basic research and, for non-paying models, Perplexity has slipped, IMHO, from possibly originally the best to joint least impressive with Claude (followed by Grok, with Gemini edging ahead of Chat GPT for best). Pro would have to be an awful lot better than free Perplexity to justify opening the wallet, but if it came for ‘free’ with Revolut Metal…
Can’t see Revolut as a main platform choice tbh. The freemium model and fintechs like T212 and Revolut have their place, but they’re no like for like sub for ii, HL or AJB. Are there any shares which they let you access which can’t easily be brought through the big players? If so, that might be a selling point.
@C-strong – that mobile app tip is interesting. I’m tempted to give it a go.
@Delta Hedge – you’re into Grok?! Ol’ MechaHitler himself? Blimey… 😉 More seriously, I agree with you that Perplexity has fallen down the rankings, along with Claude. I’d be interested in why you think a VPN is a must-have. TBH, I’ve never properly thought about it and don’t have a view. I suspect you have looked into it in depth, however 🙂
@The Accumulator, @Delta Hedge – I’ve been finding Perplexity Pro quite useful as a sort of turbo search. I’m not sure if I’d pay for it separately, or how much – there are so many AI offerings these days! But it has at least small positive value in my view.
It should be possible to get FT online subscriptions a bit below the advertised price by the way: new subscriber offer the first time, then switch off auto-renew and they’ll probably offer a cheaper rate. I was doing this before I moved to Revolut.
@TA: Never connect to public Wi-Fi without a VPN. Man in the middle attack. Given how poor the 5G, and even 4G, reception can be, even in urban areas, I think VPN is a must.
@Southbank & @TA: Turbo search sums up the feel of Perplexity well. I think maybe they haven’t spent as much on GPUs for the free version recently because their performance seems more stationary than the competition. If I was going to pay up for Pro then it would be as part of an offering like the Revolut package.
I see that Meta’s building data centres the size of Manhattan soon. This will either be the greatest folly of all time or we’re finally starting to live in the future a bit.
Grok’s a strange beast.
Avoid any hot button politics and culture war themes though and it behaves just as you’d expect of any LLM – namely some convincing hallucinations sprinkled amongst otherwise more or less useful and time saving – but wholly unoriginal – summaries.
LLMs don’t expand the frontiers of knowledge or show intelligence, but they do help to quickly survey the outline of a topic, although you kinda already need to know a fair bit about the subject matter to both spot the BS and to get the most value through a well steered prompt. It ain’t artificial ‘intelligence’ by a long shot, but there’s already some scope for modest productivity gain.
I tend to avoid anything where the fee and cost structure requires working through multiple worked examples and/or flowcharts. I don’t need good immediate customer service but do always ask the question “if this company disappeared off the internet and/or the app stopped working, would I feel secure that it would resolve in reasonable time and I would lose no money due to incompetence or fraud/bad form/company behaviour?”.
For the above two reasons, I probably would avoid.
VPN a must though, even if just for public wifi connections. Also ignoring security, sometimes it is interesting to see how your location impacts what a website is pushing on their landing page, especially during elections and/or big events. Change your IP address and reconnect to some websites, and be amazed at the difference.
@Southbank, DH and Random Coder – thank you for your thoughts 🙂 Time for me to think hard about a VPN. I’m on the verge of a paying for an AI subscription I think, though currently get by switching between the leading players.
@TA: 3 deals worth considering to get a bundled-in LLM or VPN.
Swiss based Proton Mail Unlimited for £98.28p annually gets you a VPN, 500 Gigabytes of storage, 15 email addresses, password manger and a Bitcoin wallet.
I don’t have this, but am thinking about it.
Computer Active online store offers 2 years of Norton 360 for 10 devices, including a VPN service, for just £19.99p, which is 89% less than the £179.99 charged going directly to Norton.
I do have this. The VPN’s Ok. It’s a very low cost deal IMO.
Finally, Substaker tech booster Azeem Azhar of Exponential View is offering “access 1 year of Perplexity Pro for free and 50% off your Exponential View annual subscription” available “until Monday”, which translates to US $60. Perplexity Pro is normally £194.99p annually.
I had vaguely thought about this as a way to get cheap access to the paid tier of LLMs but, honestly, I’m not much impressed with the free version of Perplexity compared with, say, the free version of Gemini from Google.
In terms of the Google LLM stable, along their free Gemini version, paid for Gemini Pro is the first month free and then £18.99p pcm. Google throw in ad free YouTube and 2 Terabytes of storage.
If you want to ‘go mad’ then Gemini Ultra is £119.99p pcm for the first 3 months after which it’s a wallet draining £234.99p pcm.
Google do throw in 30 Terabytes of storage, plus ad free YouTube of course.
Whilst Gemini Pro offers “5x” more than the free version (referencing 1,000 “workflow credits”), and enables 1,500 pages of uploads at a time; Gemini Ultra offers 12,500 “workflow credits”.
I only use the free version now, but I might consider paying for Gemini Pro in the future.
@DH – many thanks for your insights! That Gemini Pro deal looks good, especially given YouTube ads are the bane of my life.
And £20 for 2 years of VPN and anti-virus protection? Sold! Should be on commission 🙂
@Delta Hedge #26
You can also buy an O2 PAYG SIM for £10 and get 2x subscriptions to 1 year of Perplexity Pro through O2 Priority
Google doesn’t include Youtube Premium in the AI Pro tier as far as I’m aware (only Ultra)