Revolut steps up Lithuania controls after surge in suspicious reports

Revolut is tightening financial-crime controls in Lithuania after the country’s Financial Crime Investigation Service, known as FNTT, said the fintech accounted for 80% of suspicious transaction reports it received. FNTT processed about 100,000 such reports last year, roughly 80,000 of them from Revolut, with most linked to fraud aimed at private individuals.

The figures place Lithuania’s Revolut-licensed banking operation at the centre of a wider debate over scale, fraud detection and regulatory expectations in European fintech. Revolut attributes the volume of reports to the size of its customer base, saying it serves 57 million customers across the European Economic Area, several dozen times more than any other bank licensed in Lithuania.

Suspicious transaction reports are a core mechanism in anti-money laundering and fraud control. Banks and payment firms file them when monitoring systems, staff reviews or customer activity indicators point to transactions that may require examination by financial-crime authorities. High report volumes can reflect elevated risk, broad customer reach or deliberately sensitive detection thresholds.

Revolut has said it is using artificial-intelligence tools for real-time transaction monitoring and fraud prevention. The company says those systems block the vast majority of attempted fraud and that fraud levels in Lithuania are stabilising.

The company’s approach, according to the account given, favours filing or flagging questionable activity rather than missing potentially suspicious transactions. That stance can increase false positives, where legitimate customers face added checks or delays, but it also creates a larger audit trail for regulators and financial-crime investigators.

The heightened attention follows a €3.5 million penalty imposed in April last year by the Bank of Lithuania over weaknesses in Revolut’s anti-money laundering controls. The central bank supervises Revolut’s European banking operations together with the European Central Bank.

The Bank of Lithuania said at the time that the sanction followed deficiencies in the monitoring of business relationships and customer transactions. The watchdog said those failings had “resulted in the bank not always properly identifying suspicious monetary operations or transactions carried out by customers”.

The enforcement action and the FNTT reporting figures show the pressure on fast-growing digital banks that operate across borders from a single European licence. Lithuania has become an important regulatory base for Revolut’s banking services in the EEA, making local supervisory findings relevant for customers and counterparties well beyond the domestic market.

Max Karpis, an independent Revolut analyst, said the company was responding more forcefully to compliance concerns. “Revolut isn’t just reacting, it’s aggressively cleaning house,” Karpis said. “For years, some users saw the app as a convenient way to operate beyond local oversight. That era is clearly ending.”

Karpis said tighter monitoring has operational costs. “Over-flagging comes with real costs, false positives and frustrated customers, but it sends a strong signal: Revolut is taking compliance seriously while simultaneously building long-term trust,” he said.

The case underlines a central tension for large fintech platforms: systems designed to serve tens of millions of customers must screen transactions at high speed while meeting the standards of banking supervisors and financial-crime agencies. Revolut’s position is that its reporting levels are partly a function of scale and stricter controls, while Lithuanian authorities continue to measure whether those controls identify suspicious activity adequately.

This story draws on original reporting from Finextra Research.