Letter from the Editor: Digital banks have different answers to what banking should become next

Introducing our new ‘Letter from the Editor’ series featuring exclusive insight and opinion-driven analysis from Tearsheet editor Sara Khairi. The focus is to link ideas, question assumptions, and track shifts across both mature and emerging trends in financial services.

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Issue # 4

Digital banks are diverging from a shared starting point rooted in responding to the structural flaws of traditional banking, which was seen as too slow, fragmented, and inaccessible. The answer was digitization: move banking into the phone, remove friction, improve UX, and expand access.

But once that problem was largely “solved,” the question changed. Digital banks started answering differently about what banking should become next.

Two different logics about digital banking are forming

1. Access-first banking

One group – think Chime, Cash App, Varo Bank, and Current – has stayed closest to the original promise of access, lower fees, and financial stability for underserved users.

The underlying product philosophy remains anchored in clarity and control, where money is designed to feel easier to hold, easier to understand, and easier to get right. The goal is not expansion, but reduction: less friction, fewer surprises, fewer ways to get it wrong.

2. Platform banking

Another group, particularly across Europe – think N26, Monzo, Starling Bank, and bunq – has moved closer to infrastructure-led banking.

These players are layering more services around the account, expanding into adjacent financial products, and positioning the account itself as a platform rather than a standalone product. 

Then there is Revolut, which doesn’t neatly fit into either category. It is compressing financial behavior itself into a continuous system where FX, trading, crypto, payments, savings, and wealth are expressions of the same underlying intent.

The real divergence: What “simplicity” actually means

The clearest split across these models is how they define simplicity. 

For access-first models like Chime, simplicity is reduction, which means fewer decisions, fewer steps, and fewer chances to get things wrong. The aim is to minimize cognitive load and keep financial life legible and stable.

For platform-led neobanks in Europe, simplicity becomes integration: one account, multiple services, less switching between providers. Complexity does not disappear but is consolidated into a single system.

For Revolut, simplicity shows up differently, through compression. Instead of removing products or steps, the bank works to eliminate the sense of separation between them. Financial actions flow into one another on a continuous surface responding to intent in real time.

Traditional banking and even most digital banking today are still account-based. You log in, you perform actions, you log out. There is a clear beginning and end to each interaction. 

What is evolving in more aggressive digital banking models is closer to behavior-based banking. The system no longer waits for discrete sessions but sits closer to financial behavior itself – spend, earn, invest, move – and stays present across the entire flow.

That is where the contrast becomes useful: Chime helps you manage money when you engage with it. Revolut increasingly tries to remain present while you are engaging with money anywhere.

If you look at Revolut specifically, its expansion into trading, crypto rails, wealth push, and now moves toward more formalized private banking capabilities is directional layering. Each layer sits closer to a different form of financial intent:

• Trading sits closest to curiosity
• Wealth sits closest to accumulation
• Payments sit closest to action

Digital banks were supposed to simplify financial life by making it more legible through fewer branches, fees, and layers. But what’s making way now is continuity. And continuity is not always easier to read.

When access-first banks reinforce stability and predictability, they strengthen clear boundaries around money. When Revolut compresses financial behavior into a single environment, those boundaries begin to blur as a structural shift in how financial decisions are experienced.

The question becomes: “Do financial actions still feel clearly separated?” Because once they don’t, banking shifts from a system you use to an environment you operate inside.

So, where’s the digital banking narrative going?

This is not a story of winners and losers. It is a story of divergence becoming structural.

Access-first banks are optimizing for clarity at the user level. Platform banks are optimizing for integration across financial products. And systems like Revolut are optimizing for continuity, where financial actions are part of a single flow.

These are different interpretations of what it means to help people manage money in today’s world, where money is becoming increasingly embedded, automated, and always in motion.

– Sara

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