Revolut has secured a key regulatory milestone in Latin America after Argentina’s central bank approved its purchase of Banco Cetelem Argentina from BNP Paribas Personal Finance.
The decision, announced by the London-based fintech on 24 September 2026, allows the company to complete a deal first outlined in mid-2025 and to convert the small local lender into a fully regulated banking vehicle under a new name, Revolut Bank Argentina S.A.U.
The approval does not mean an immediate consumer launch.
After closing, the entity will operate as a licensed bank but will not at first offer products or services to the public.
Revolut says this initial phase will be used to meet remaining regulatory and operational requirements, refine a local offering, and prepare for a later commercial debut.
Reports in the Argentine press have pointed to 2027 as a likely window for a public rollout.
Upon completion, Agustín Danza is expected to become chief executive, subject to the usual central bank confirmations.
The company has also assembled a local board that includes Juan Marotta, formerly of HSBC in Argentina and South America, as chair.
Argentina is being framed as a strategic market.
Revolut says more than 150,000 people have already joined a waitlist, and it has cited strong interest from prospective customers and commercial partners.
The group already serves more than 80 million customers worldwide and has been expanding across Latin America, including licensed banking activity in Mexico and earlier moves in Brazil and Colombia.
In Argentina, it has previously spoken about products tailored to local needs, including multi-currency accounts, fee-free transfers and foreign-exchange tools, in a market where residents have long sought dollar-denominated options and fast digital payments.
Terms of the Cetelem purchase have not been disclosed, and coverage indicates the deal does not include the lender’s historic customer book.
The regulatory nod is a genuine expansion step.
Buying an existing licensed bank short-circuits a slower path to a local charter and gives Revolut a regulated platform from which to build.
That is the story the company wants to tell: scale, licenses and a foothold in one of the region’s most closely watched consumer finance markets.
The same week, however, has underlined how uneven that scale can look from the customer side.
Revolut has been dealing with fresh data-incident notices tied to DriveWealth, a US broker that previously supported US share trading in the Revolut app.
DriveWealth has said an unauthorised party accessed its systems in early September 2026 and that certain historical personal information may have been taken.
Revolut has stressed that its own systems, funds and investments were not compromised, and that the exposure relates to older records from before it changed how US trading was structured in various markets.
Even so, customers have been told that names, contact details, employment information and other profile data may have been involved.
The DriveWealth episode landed close to a separate incident in which Revolut said it had fulfilled fraudulent information requests sent from an unauthorised mailbox on a genuine government domain, potentially exposing identity documents, verification images and transaction records for a limited group of users.
Two third-party or process failures in quick succession are a reminder that growth multiplies the number of doors through which data can leave.
Onboarding remains another source of friction.
Revolut relies on Onfido for know-your-customer checks, yet many applicants still describe a brittle digital process: repeated document rejections, selfie loops, and long stretches of uncertainty before an account is fully live.
The contrast is awkward.
eToro, a much smaller platform that also uses Onfido, is widely described by users as having a smoother path through the same vendor.
That suggests the problem is not only the identity tool, but how Revolut has wired retries, support and exception handling around it.
Regulatory and conduct risk has followed the company for years.
It has faced enforcement action and supervisory scrutiny in multiple markets, and customers have repeatedly said the app became a conduit for scams, with delayed freezes and disputed refunds.
Account restrictions are another recurring complaint: funds locked or features limited for long periods, often with little explanation beyond generic compliance language.
Revolut argues that freezes are required by anti-money-laundering rules and that it aims to resolve cases quickly once information is supplied.
Users, and in some cases ombudsman files, tell a different story of opaque timelines and abrupt closures.
These tensions are not unique to one fintech.
Rapid international growth, a thin local footprint at launch, heavy reliance on vendors, and automated risk engines all create the same pattern: licences arrive faster than operational polish.
Argentina will test whether Revolut can convert a banking shell into a service that is easier to join, harder to impersonate, and clearer when something goes wrong. The central bank approval is a green light to build. It is not, on its own, proof that the customer experience has caught up with the map.