Why Hungarian Banks Fought Revolut
Not to Protect You, But to Protect Their Economic Rents
Hungarian banks have spent years quietly taxing everyday life — fees on every move, bad FX, high rates while your HUF slowly evaporates — and Revolut’s low-cost, transparent app exposed that it never had to be this way. Now the push to “regulate” and domesticate Revolut isn’t about protecting you, it’s about pulling your money back onto their rails so that when it comes to real sums — flats, mortgages, long-term savings — they can still decide the terms and punish you for escaping their system in the everyday.
A couple is selling their flat in Budapest. They’re not rich, not investors — just moving to a slightly bigger place because they finally have a kid on the way or they. They’ve been using Revolut for a while: low fees, clean app, instant notifications, great FX exchange rate, no hidden costs. When the buyer signs the preliminary contract, they give him their Revolut Hungarian forint (HUF) account to send the deposit and downpayment. The money arrives. They see it in the app, breathe out, and start planning the move.
The buyer, meanwhile, goes to his (specific) Hungarian bank to arrange the mortgage for the rest of the price. There’s the usual process: documents, income statements, approvals, more papers. Weeks go by. Then one day the bank calls him back:
There’s a problem. First, we can’t disburse the mortgage to a Revolut account. Second, we cannot accept downpayment paid to Revolut accounts, therefore tell the seller to refund the deposit and downpayment, give you a proper Hungarian HUF account. Once the money goes back and you have a local bank account from the seller, we’ll continue.
The buyer stares at the phone.
The contract is signed. The sellers have already mentally moved. The deposit and downpayment is sitting safely on their Revolut. Now his bank is basically saying: go back, unwind what’s already done, and pull the sellers into our system too — or you’re not getting your loan.
He calls the sellers, embarrassed:
I’m sorry, the bank says they won’t pay out the mortgage to Revolut. They want you to give a Hungarian bank account. They even told me to ask you to send back the deposit and downpayment first, and then I should pay it again to your local bank.
The sellers are confused and angry. Why should they open or use a more expensive Hungarian account, with significantly higher fees and worse conditions, just to make the buyer’s bank happy? Why should they reverse a perfectly valid payment that everyone agreed to?
But they also know the truth: if the buyer doesn’t get the mortgage, selling is getting complicated. So now the bank isn’t just deciding how the buyer can bank. It is indirectly deciding how the seller must bank as well.
Not by talking to them, not by regulation, but by holding the buyer’s mortgage hostage.
God bless freedom, rule-of-law and consumer rights!
On paper, this is “risk policy” and “procedural requirements”.
In reality, it’s a very simple message to everyone involved:
You can play with your shiny foreign fintech app for everyday things, but when it comes to real money — flats, mortgages, life decisions —you will come back to us, on our terms.
That’s Hungarian reality in 2025.
This is what the fight about Revolut looks like, not in press releases, but at the kitchen table.
For years, being a normal Hungarian bank customer felt like paying a quiet tax on existing.
You opened an account because your employer told you to (even though, in theory, you have the constitutional right to be paid in cash). You took the card they pushed at you. Every month, a little money disappeared: account management fee, card fee, SMS fee, transfer fee, “whatever-we-feel-like” fee — which easily adds up to a few hundred euros a year. You didn’t really understand the statements, but you understood the pattern: the bank always gets paid.
You weren’t a customer. You were yield.
The banks did well. Very well. FX denominated mortgage schemes (scams), above-average profits, year after year, in a small market where everyone politely pretended there was “competition,” but somehow the price of being banked never really came down. They invested in marble floors, owned glass buildings, branding, political connections – and called that “stability.”
Then one day, someone at work or in the family said:
Have you tried Revolut?
You download it, mostly out of curiosity. Two minutes later you have a card in your phone, physical card shipped in 24 hours for free, and a balance in an app that looks like it was designed this decade. You test it: top up, pay somewhere, buy a train ticket, send money to a friend.
And then you see it:
the FX rate is… close and not far from the actual FX rate.
No mysterious “bank buying/selling” spread, no hidden surcharge, no “surprise, we shaved 2–3% off because we can.”
You make a few more transactions. You realise:
there’s no monthly account fee quietly eating you alive, your notifications are instant, clear, and human-readable,
sending money abroad doesn’t feel like being fined.
At that moment, somewhere deep inside the system, an alarm goes off.
Because you’re not just saving a few hundred forints. You’re discovering a forbidden truth:
being banked doesn’t have to mean being milked.
From the banks’ perspective, Revolut was never just a “new competitor”.
Competitors they can handle. They know how to copy a product, throw together an “offer,” tweak a fee, quietly coordinate. They’ve been doing that for decades — at least on paper. In reality, Hungarian banks were never really competing with each other; they were competing in who could milk customers more efficiently. And politics was always there to help.
Revolut was worse: it was a comparison point.
Side by side, it exposed the domestic game:
Here is how much FX really costs.
Here is how fast a transfer can really be.
Here is what an app looks like when the goal is usability, not upsell.
Transparent and easy terms.
Every forint you moved to Revolut was a forint that didn’t go into the comfortable Hungarian profit machine, ultimately landing as a saving to you.
You started using Revolut for trips. Then for online shopping. Then for saving a bit in different currencies. Then you thought: what if my salary went here? What if I stopped feeding the old bank so much?
Multiply that by hundreds of thousands of people (actually cc. 2 million Hungarian customers). Now you see why “regulating Revolut” suddenly became a national sport.
Of course, that’s not how the story was told.
The official lines were clean and responsible: we must protect Hungarian consumers; we must ensure fair competition; we must make sure everyone contributes to infrastructure and plays by the same rules.
Some of it wasn’t even wrong.
Revolut operated for a long time like a ghost in the Hungarian system: officially a Lithuanian bank with Hungarian customers. Complaints, supervision, accountability – all a bit abstract and far away. From a regulator’s point of view, that’s uncomfortable.
But notice what’s missing from the speeches and press releases: You.
Your reality in this story is simple:
before Revolut: high fees, opaque pricing, sluggish digital services;
with Revolut: cheaper, clearer, faster.
So when the same banks that have been quietly overcharging you for the last 30 years suddenly discover their inner consumer-rights activist, you’re allowed to be suspicious. Those banks who are not failing on the rule of law (i.e. FX denominated mortgages)
Because if this was really about you, the logic would be:
Revolut proves the old price level is indefensible.
Let’s regulate Revolut properly and force domestic banks to match or beat its value.
But that’s not what happened. It never happens in Hungary.
Instead, the energy went into pulling Revolut into the same cage: same domestic obligations, same infrastructure burdens, same regulatory leash. The goal is not to lift everyone up to the Revolut standard; the goal is to drag Revolut down into the old ecosystem where banks set the terms and you adjust.
Look at the ATM debate. It’s a perfect example.
Banks began talking about how Revolut was “free riding” on their ATM networks. Revolut customers withdraw cash from Hungarian ATMs, they said, but Revolut doesn’t pay to build or maintain those machines. That’s unfair, that distorts competition, they argued.
Technically, there’s a point there.
But notice how — overnight — the Hungarian ATM network stops being just infrastructure and becomes a moral weapon. Suddenly the big banks are protectors of fairness, defenders of investment, guardians of cash access in rural areas.
Not one of them opens with the more honest line:
We’re upset because we built a system that lets us charge you a lot for basic services, and now some foreign app is teaching you that this was never inevitable.
And then there’s the politics.
Hungary’s banking system isn’t just a market. It’s part utility, part political instrument. Banks are expected to help implement government and political schemes, channel subsidies, support “national strategic goals.” In exchange, they get a certain protection from reality. It’s a strategic partnership with politics!
Revolut doesn’t fit into that pact. It doesn’t care who’s in power. It doesn’t promise to support some flagship loan scheme. It just offers you an account that’s cheaper and better. At least till now!
From the state’s perspective, the more people move their money, salaries, and savings to Revolut, the more financial life escapes the domestic web of influence and data. That’s uncomfortable.
So “consumer protection” becomes a very convenient language for something else: reasserting control over a chunk of financial life that was slipping away.
Where does this leave you?
On paper, you’re supposed to be better off. Revolut is finally opening a proper Hungarian branch. You get a Hungarian account, Hungarian National Bank control, clearer local supervision, easier salary payments. It becomes a “real” Hungarian bank.
But here’s the contrarian fear:
Revolut gets domesticated, normalised, tied into local obligations.
Domestic banks keep their habits, maybe making just enough cosmetic changes to claim they’re “innovating” (they already started to copy Revolut solutions).
The gap between them narrows – not because Hungarian banks seriously improve, but because Revolut is slowly pushed to look and behave like them.
The rebellion becomes a brand. The app remains, but the escape route starts to close.
So yes, you’re right to say:
Revolut was not milking the customers as banks do. Hungarian banks do what they want, make above-average profits.
That’s the core of the story.
Hungarian banks did everything they could to regulate Revolut not because they suddenly care too much about you, but because for the first time in a long time, you had an option that didn’t feed their margins.
Revolut, with all its flaws, was a quiet consumer revolt in app form.
The real question now is simple and brutal:
Now that they’ve dragged the revolt into the tent and called it “regulation”,
will they be forced to change with it —
or will they simply change it and leave you right where you started?
On that day Revolut turns Devolut!
Disagree? Good. I don’t write to be right—I write to be tested. Bring your “Tenth Man” view, your sharpest counterpoint, or even a quiet doubt. Sometimes the most useful critique is the one that unsettles my own thinking.
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