Revolut bought a French banking licence, and I owe you a correction with a deadline on it

The European Central Bank's Governing Council adopted the decision on Monday 10 August 2026, and Revolut Bank S.A. is a licensed French bank [1][2].

I also owe you a correction on yesterday's brief, and it has a deadline attached to it.

Revolut paid a billion euros for permission

The licence came out of a joint assessment by the Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel et de Résolution and the ECB, with the ECB Governing Council formally adopting it on 10 August [1][2]. Revolut already serves around 30 million customers across Western Europe, and the Lithuanian entity, Revolut Bank UAB, stays where it is, so the group now runs two ECB-supervised banks rather than one [1]. France gets served first, with Germany, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain in later phases [1].

The commitments attached to it run to more than one billion euros of investment in the region, over 600 hires, a Western European headquarters in Paris in 2027, and a ten-year lease already signed in the Bourse district [1][2]. Béatrice Cossa-Dumurgier runs Western Europe and Frédéric Oudéa, formerly of Société Générale, chairs the supervisory board of the French bank [1][2].

None of that is a feature. A licence does not ship anything to a customer. What it buys is the right to hold the relationship directly instead of renting it from a partner bank, and the freedom to change the product without asking somebody else's compliance team first. If you have ever tried to launch anything on a sponsor arrangement, you know exactly what a ten-year lease in Paris is really paying for.

The correction, and it changes what you should do this month

Yesterday I wrote that the GENIUS Act rulemaking tracker I was reading recorded no proposed rules, none open for comment, and no final rules. I quoted that as the state of the world. That was my error rather than the tracker's, because a tracker is somebody's editorial choice about scope and I never checked the register underneath it.

The Federal Register carries at least three GENIUS proposed rules. The National Credit Union Administration published its implementation proposal on 18 May 2026, comments closed 17 July [5]. The FDIC published Bank Secrecy Act and sanctions compliance standards for its supervised permitted payment stablecoin issuers on 5 June 2026, comments closed 4 August [4]. And FinCEN published the Permitted Payment Stablecoin Issuer Customer Identification Program proposal on 22 June 2026, with comments open until 21 August 2026 [3]. Chapman and Cutler's tracker carries the same three and dates the CIP proposal the same way [8].

One of those readings says nothing is happening and you should wait. The other says there are ten days left to file a comment on the rule that will define how you identify the customer of a payment stablecoin, and customer identification is the line I have watched eat the most engineering time on every payments build I have worked on.

Yesterday's larger point survives and I still believe it: the deadline slipped, the compliance date did not, and the gap you were going to implement in is being eaten a week at a time. But the version I published had you sitting still, and there is something to do before 21 August.

Google will move your Search campaigns whether or not you reply

Google Ads emailed advertisers on 5 August 2026 to say that from 1 September, Search campaigns running automatically created assets or the campaign-level broad match setting will be converted to AI Max for Search [6][7]. Campaigns on automatically created assets arrive with search term matching and text customisation switched on. Campaigns on campaign-level broad match arrive with search term matching switched on [6].

There are two ways out and both require you to act. Turn the legacy setting off before 1 September, or turn AI Max on yourself so that you choose the configuration rather than inheriting it [6]. Dynamic Search Ads are on a separate and much longer runway, with automatic migration currently scheduled to begin in February 2027 [6][7].

The two cohorts are not in the same position, and the email does not make that obvious. For broad match campaigns the setting largely relocates into AI Max without changing how it behaves. For campaigns on automatically created assets, search term matching adds automated query expansion, which is a wider brief than the creative generation that feature was doing before [7]. That second group is the one to look at this month. It may well perform better than what you are running now. It is still not a decision you made.

Read from the rails

Three things moved and none of them arrived the same way. Revolut chose its licence and paid for it in euros and floorspace. The stablecoin rule is being written in public, in a register anybody can read, which is exactly why I have no excuse for having summarised it from somewhere else. Google's change arrives by email and applies whether you answer it or not.

Two dates for the calendar. Comments on the customer identification programme close on 21 August 2026 [3]. Automatic migration to AI Max begins on 1 September 2026 [6]. One of them you can still influence.