Vlad Yatsenko

Founded

The strongest consistent account is that former trader Nik Storonsky developed and financed the multi-currency-card idea, recruited former Credit Suisse colleague Yatsenko to create the software, and became CEO while Yatsenko became CTO. Their different skills—business/product/fundraising and bank-software engineering—formed the founding split. Revolut's official materials and annual reports have long called Yatsenko a co-founder. The Next Web, summarising a 2026 Storonsky interview with David Rubenstein, reported that Yatsenko joined as the first employee and received the co-founder title partly to recruit engineers. This later account complicates legal/conventional founder semantics but does not negate Yatsenko's pre-launch technical contribution or the company's formal public designation. Forbes Ukraine and later profiles have reported that Yatsenko received roughly 20% for building the technical side while Storonsky supplied about £300,000. No reviewed founder agreement, original cap table or filing confirms those exact terms, so they are not treated as definitive.

Education

Forbes Ukraine describes an honours graduation from the Mykolaiv branch of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, now Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University. LinkedIn uses National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy wording; these appear to describe the same Mykolaiv institution and programme, not separate degrees.

Charities

Yatsenko responded to the failed donation experience with an initial €100,000 personal gift and a public promise to match up to €1 million of additional weekend donations. RTÉ and its appeal report confirm that he fulfilled the €1.1 million total commitment.

Communities

Endeavor Ukraine said he joined its entrepreneur network after serving on a September 2025 international selection panel and wanted to share his operating experience with the next generation. This is network participation, not evidence of an Endeavor investment mandate or external board seat.

Family

Forbes Ukraine lists him as married with two children. Names, ages and private household details are omitted. He has publicly discussed his father, who remained in Ukraine and whom Yatsenko described as a Ukrainian patriot.

More

Companies House records August 1983, British nationality and residence in England. Forbes identifies him as a dual British-Ukrainian citizen. Secondary profiles report birth in East Germany, but no reviewed civil record establishes an exact day or place. Forbes Ukraine records Germany as his birthplace and says his father was a former Soviet military officer who left the army after the USSR collapsed. Secondary biographical reporting places the family's later home near Odesa. Exact childhood movements remain incompletely documented. In a rare Business Insider interview, Yatsenko said he began coding around age 15 and sometimes practised on paper because computer access was limited. He connected that constraint to startup creativity: limited resources require unconventional solutions. After university he worked at Comarch in Kraków, moved to London for UBS in 2010, and later held engineering roles at Deutsche Bank, Lab49 and Credit Suisse. Titles and exact month boundaries come mostly from professional-profile material rather than employer archives. Yatsenko described the early customer proposition as the ability to exchange, send and spend money anywhere for free. Revolut launched publicly in 2015 around a mobile multi-currency account and card, then broadened into investments, business services, credit and other products. At JUXT's 2024 engineering conference, attendee notes quote Yatsenko recommending a monolith first and splitting only when teams interfere with one another. The same notes describe PostgreSQL, in-house frameworks, a tightly standardised architecture and a Kubernetes migration completed by a small team in days. These are conference notes, not an audited architecture specification. Yatsenko argued for standard processes, clear ownership, reusable frameworks and market-entry playbooks, while warning that excessive standardisation can suppress learning. JUXT material says Revolut limited its technology choices and used platform engineering to support more than 1,000 engineers. In the Flinks interview he said every person, himself included, can become a bottleneck; automation should reduce human weaknesses while organisations focus people on their strengths. He paired automation with adaptable principles rather than rigid hierarchy. Attendee notes from his JUXT talk record his biggest engineering regret as a data-warehouse solution that consumed four years and did not scale. The useful attribution is to his own retrospective; technical details and replacement economics were not published. Discussing bank licensing, Yatsenko said anything vital to the business should be built or controlled internally because a partner can constrain product and regulatory ambition. He still recognised that market entry requires local rules, payment systems and regulator engagement. His operating view is that starting sooner exposes unknowns sooner. Revolut used living playbooks: separate repeatable lessons from country-specific constraints, update the process, and avoid assuming identical regulation or customer behaviour across markets. Yatsenko compared Revolut's desired convenience to Uber removing local taxi friction. In 2023 he described a financial supermarket in one app, with country-specific payment methods hidden behind a simpler interface and a broader set of locally regulated products. Revolut's audited 2024 group report recorded 52.5 million customers, £3.1 billion revenue and £790 million net profit. The 2025 secondary sale valued the company at $75 billion, and transition reporting said the platform served more than 70 million customers in 2026. These are corporate outcomes produced by the wider organisation, not sole personal achievements. During his CTO tenure Revolut built regulated banking operations in Europe and entered UK bank mobilisation in July 2024. The UK bank launched fully in March 2026, shortly before his transition. Licensing was an institutional governance and regulatory outcome, not a technical sign-off attributable to one executive. The 2024 annual report describes machine-learning fraud detection, fraud specialists, data scientists, former law-enforcement personnel, biometric controls and a customer security hub. These are company capabilities under broader management and control functions; the report does not assign each control personally to Yatsenko. Customers reported login, card-payment, transfer, top-up and currency-exchange failures on 26 November 2021. The disruption also affected some Late Late Toy Show donations. Revolut apologised and restored services; public reports did not establish a personal error by Yatsenko or publish a full root-cause analysis. Lithuania's data-protection authority said a breach potentially affected 50,150 customers worldwide, including names, contact details, account information and masked partial card data. Revolut said its security team quickly removed the access and customer funds were not endangered. The regulator investigated the relevant Revolut entities; no reviewed source assigns individual wrongdoing to Yatsenko. Revolut's 2021 accounts were delayed and BDO qualified its opinion over evidence supporting £477 million of revenue; later accounts obtained sufficient evidence. Separate reporting and regulatory actions concerned sanctions/AML monitoring, including a 2025 €3.5 million fine against Revolut Bank UAB. These were corporate and entity-level findings during his CTO tenure, not individual sanctions against him. Forbes Ukraine described his long hours and reported that he called his management style liberal but saw high KPIs and founder ambition as necessary for rapid growth. In interviews he disputed claims that Revolut forced overtime while allowing that manager conflict could produce unfair dismissal. WIRED and former staff reported free work, aggressive targets, long hours and burnout; Revolut said its culture was evolving. Forbes Ukraine preserved a public comment in which he objected to calling people "resources", calling human capital more important than financial capital. That view sits alongside his support for demanding goals and the documented criticism of Revolut's historical performance culture. On 24 February 2022 Yatsenko called Vladimir Putin one of history's most brazen liars and said Ukraine "is and will be free." In a 2023 interview he traced his anger at Putin's regime to 2014 and described anti-Ukrainian propaganda he saw in 2008. Yatsenko said a non-Ukrainian employee proposed the response and the team launched simplified access for Ukrainian refugees within weeks, reaching about 450,000 opened accounts and 100,000 active users by the 2023 interview. He credited team execution rather than claiming sole authorship. Yatsenko told Forbes Ukraine his holding had fallen from about 5% three years earlier to 3%. Forbes later estimated a little under 3%. This is founder equity in Revolut, not a personal angel investment; current fully diluted ownership and secondary-sale proceeds are not public. Yatsenko said he felt content because Revolut had matured from an ambitious startup into a highly impactful global company. Donato Lucia, who joined in 2018 and had become head of technology, succeeded him as vice president of technology. Revolut did not disclose another reason for the transition. In 2023 he said he no longer always worked until 10 p.m., started no earlier than 9:30 and worked better later. He said wealth rankings did not matter, described choosing fintech pragmatically, admired aspects of Google's early organisational culture and viewed Elon Musk as a powerful marketing machine who sometimes gets carried away.

Mentioned above: the Deutsche Bank mafia →

From Vlad's own website — common ground for a warm intro.

Intro paths

Co-founders at Revolut

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Nikolay StoronskyCo-founder & CEO

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Nik StoronskyCo-founder