Revolut Business Head on Leaving Consulting for Product Work

James Gibson, head of Revolut Business, left a career in strategy consulting after seeing Revolut’s 2016 multicurrency app and joined the company a year later, shifting from business development into product and engineering.

Gibson studied PPE at Oxford and spent five years at Oliver Wyman advising European organisations on digital transformation and technology choices. He said a 2016 app that let users hold multiple currencies in a single account and exchange them instantly changed his assumptions about how banking products could be built.

At Revolut he moved from business development into product work, collaborating with engineers to take features from concept to live use. He described the early company as small and fast-moving, with limited formal onboarding and a culture of learning while building.

Gibson cited shifts in business banking: processes that once required paperwork, branch visits and weeks can now be completed online in hours. He gave examples including incorporating a business in less than a day, opening an account without visiting a branch and managing finances from a mobile phone.

He pointed to artificial intelligence and improved development tools as factors lowering the barriers to creating software. Gibson contrasted the past, when new products required specialist teams and substantial investment, with the present, where an individual can move from idea to working prototype in days. He warned that a higher rate of failure is likely as more ideas are attempted, while more people will be able to build products.

Gibson described automation, integrated financial systems and intelligent software as reducing routine tasks and allowing workers to focus on higher-value activities.

Gibson wrote: ‘Technology is not valuable because it is new. It is valuable because it changes what people are able to do.’

His comments were provided for a 60th anniversary series on 22 September 2026 that collected industry perspectives on how technology has changed work and expectations.