2021 was the best year in IPO history, with companies raising a record $600 billion through IPOs. However, this year will not match last year's, mainly due to a significant reassessment of valuations, especially for technology IPOs. Check out our article on the expected fintech IPOs in 2022 and find out why some firms will instead hold off on going public this year.

The first news about the possible IPO of Revolut, Britain's biggest privately owned financial service, occurred last autumn. Bloomberg reported that Revolut's Russian-born CEO and co-founder Nik Storonsky hopes to generate billions in revenue before its IPO. Last summer, Revolut raised 800$ million with a valuation of $33 billion. The firm was founded in 2015 and has its headquarters in London. Cryptocurrency and stock trading, budgeting tools, bank accounts, and international money transfers are just a few of the services offered by Revolut. In 2019, Deloitte named Revolut as UK's fastest-growing technology company.

At the end of spring, The Times reported that Revolut is seeking to hire an investor relations team. Such a step is usually perceived as a precursor to a floatation, also known as an Initial Public Offering (IPO). Each company, which is willing to go public, must have a track record of growth and hire an investment bank to come in and underwrite the IPO. After the necessary documentation is completed, the company sells the stocks to institutional investors. Once the initial block of shares has been sold, the company establishes an initial price and date for starting to trade on a stock exchange. You may read further in our IPO section if you're interested in a more thorough explanation of the IPO procedure.

Despite the news from The Times, the probability of Revolut going public is very low. This summer, Nik Storonsky gave an interview to Bloomberg, where he stated that Revolut would go public in the next two years because of "turbulent market conditions". In particular, Revolut aims to increase revenues in the face of falling tech valuations and rising interest rates.

There are only a few blog posts and articles around the possible IPO of Revolut's rival Monzo. British online banking tool Monzo was established the same year as Revolut, with headquarters in London. Monzo's three main revenue streams are payments, banking services, and interest income. One of the first "challenger banks"— small, recently established retail banks that directly compete with large corporate banks in the UK—was Monzo.

At the end of last year, Monzo had closed a $500 million round that increased the company's valuation to $4.5 billion, as reported by Financial Times. Before it, news about the possible Monzo IPO occurred last spring. In an interview with Wired, CEO TS Anil said that IPO for Monzo is possible "as soon as 2023".  

Another Revolut rival is Swedish fintech Klarna, which is also willing to go public but struggling to do it this year. News about possible Klarna's IPO occurred last winter when MergerMarket reported a potential stock market debut by Klarna during the 2021 year. Although, Klarna didn't go public and probably neither this year.

Klarna was founded in 2005 in Sweden, with headquarters in Stockholm and later in Berlin. It offers BNPL ("Buy now, pay later") services, supporting 460 000 merchants out of 160 million users in 45 countries, as per its official website. This autumn, it also expands to the Czech Republic.

Last summer, Klarna closed a $639 million round that increased the company's valuation to $45.6 billion, as stated by CNBC. That financing round made Klarna the most valuable fintech unicorn in Europe. Unfortunately, one year later, Klarna raised 800$ million with a valuation that dropped 85% to 6.7$ billion, according to TechCrunch. Among all mentioned companies in this article, probably Klarna and Monzo have the most negligible chances of going public this year.

One of the strongest competitors in the fintech market is Stripe, an Irish-American financial service and software as a service (SaaS) company with two headquarters in San Francisco and Dublin. In The Crunchbase Unicorn Board, where the most valuable private firms in the world are listed, Stripe was ranked fifth, after Shein and SpaceX. The range of the company's products is wide: from online payment processing to anti-fraud tools. Stripe was established in 2010 by two brothers, John and Patrick Collison.

The first news about a possible Stripe IPO occurred last summer when Reuters reported the hiring process that Stripe initiated. As a result, the law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP was hired to help with preparations for IPO. The company considered going public through a direct listing rather than a traditional IPO.

Last year, the company raised $600 million in a Series H round of funding that increased the company's value to $95 billion. Due to the enormous private market value of Stripe, its IPO may become one of the biggest of all time. Although there is currently no information on the exact date of going public, there is an extremely high likelihood that Stripe won't do so before the year is over.