Founder & CEO @Housecatinc | Early @Monzo
San Francisco
Joined August 2011
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I've said this many times: Getting regulated as a UK bank is something of a poisoned chalice.
And I'm still unclear if Revolut is aware of this...
Now that Revolut are licensed the UK regulators (FCA and PRA) have mind-bending powers over their business. And no matter what Nik says the reality is that the FCA and PRA are some of the most sophisticated regulators in the world. Compared to other more rules based regulators the UK takes a more outcomes based approach, i.e. you need to prove that your products don't cause customer harm.
It's no secret that this was a steep learning curve for Monzo, but I think we got given some leeway because in 2016/17 we had like sub 100,000 customers or whatever. Revolut on the other hand has 14 million in the UK alone and their CEO has been publicly complaining about the regulatory processes for years. I'm sure there are many FCA and PRA staff who cannot *wait* to look deeply into how Revolut runs their business.
Ultimately I think that the UK regulators gave Revolut the UK licence precisely *because* they needed to get regulatory oversight of a business that was becoming systemically risky to the UK banking sector.
Revolut should stop thinking of the licence as the victory at the end of a application process, but rather a start of a more painful reality...
Bank of England orders review of Revolut’s product approval processes
The Bank of England’s PRA has ordered a Section 166 review of Revolut’s product approval processes, according to the Financial Times. The order came earlier this year, around the time Revolut finally secured its full UK banking licence in March. The aim is to examine the risks around rapid launches of new financial products and better understand the robustness of the group’s internal systems.
A Section 166 forces a firm to appoint external experts—accountants or lawyers—to examine its controls and produce a report with recommendations. It is an evidence-gathering tool. If failures are found, regulators can then impose penalties or take other action.
This follows earlier action by the European Central Bank. Last year the ECB found “deficiencies” in Revolut’s new product approval processes and ordered a third-party review of its risk, compliance and legal functions governing new product launches in Europe. The move came after CEO Nik Storonsky said he likes employees to act like “self-guided missiles” with little oversight when developing products.
Revolut’s wait for a full UK licence was already the longest of any bank in the country. With the licence now granted, the Section 166 shows regulators still want extra safeguards in place before Revolut pushes further into core banking products. The practical question is how far this slows product velocity. Whoever leaked the detail has also made visible a level of supervisory attention we normally don't know about.
I really wanted a believable cat, that told the story about how our product is friendly and approachable, feels like home, and doesn't take itself too serious.
Just shipped a few major improvements to Housecat AI Assistant for Email:
-- Better memory
-- improved MCP tools, skills, and instructions
-- Tell the agent which email or inbox you're working on, and show this in chat too, like this:
Quick AB test to compare traditional LLMs against the new Jev model from @typesafeai
The ask was to categorise 100 of my recent emails as:
1) automated / human
2) marketing / operational
Compared to Codex Mini
14.5x cheaper
17.5x faster
here's a more detailed discussion of how we might classify emails including more on Jev vs LLMs from @nzoschke
housecat.com/blog/classifyin…
Launched a new changelog page to publicly track what we ship at @housecatinc
Can barely keep up with the new features that are dropping that's how fast the team is moving!
We're building Hosuecat because we believe two things at once:
Complex tasks like managing your email require proper user experiences and tools (aka UI)
AND
Existing email tools sucks. We want the power of AI agents to help us get work done and avoid boring tasks etc.
This week we merged more PRs than in any other week to date. And we still have 3 days of the week to go!
My CTO says he can barely believe the amount of code he is writing.
Insanely excited about what we’re building…
Pulley is shutting down
What is the next best cap table product?
Or should we just vibe code this as well...
Email templates are great when they work, but being limited to {first_name} {last_name} is like being stuck in 2007.
We just launched Intelligent Templates -- write any variable you want and Housecat fills the blanks.
You get the consistency of a template (no ai slop, consistent approach) but with the intelligence and power of an LLM to fill in the blanks.
Here's a quick demo, would love to know what you think!
I built myself Muse / Instinct over one weekend...
The main advantages are that it uses my existing Codex / Claude subscriptions, runs in our existing exe dev environment (i.e. no data to Meta), and it's infinitely customizable (it can edit its own code!)
Give yourself a standalone computer (i.e. a VM)
Install or build some software on it
Run a coding agent with access to both
Once you’ve tried this for the first time, it’s hard to go back.
The future isn't pure chat. It's software with the intelligence of an agent built in.
We have an opensource project that makes this easy to setup here that has been very productive for us
github.com/housecat-inc/scra…
