A bank with adult content on the side? OnlyFans plots its financial future

In series 4 of the BBC’s hit drama Industry, viewers are introduced to the villainous chief financial officer of Tender, a fast-growing digital payments company.

Whitney Halberstram, played by Max Minghella of The Social Network fame, has a goal to transform what he calls the “PayPal of bukkake” into an AI-driven neo-bank – but several obstacles stand in his way.

Tender relies on revenues from Siren, a fictional adult entertainment website, and Halberstram wants to terminate the risque relationship before an upcoming online safety bill is introduced by a new government. However, his co-founder opposes the rebrand because, in the character’s words, “jerking off is recession-proof”.

What did former financiers Mickey Down and Konrad Kay have in mind when writing these scenes? Strip away the board drama, and some of the colourful hedonism for which Industry has become well known, and it starts to look like aspects the story of OnlyFans. Except OnlyFans isn’t a bank – at least not yet.

Since it was founded in Harlow, Essex in 2016, the platform has grown from a general subscription service for online creators with niche interests into a social media behemoth, counting four million creators and 378m users.

OnlyFans takes 20% of all creator earnings and processes $7bn a year in payments, but is not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. By some metrics, it is the most profitable consumer media company founded in Britain in the last 30 years. In 2024, pre-tax profit was $684m on net revenue of $1.41bn, a margin of roughly 48%. For comparison, Sky UK reported a pre-tax profit of £253m that year, on net revenue for £10.39bn, a 2.4% margin.

OnlyFans has facilitated what some regard as a worker-led revolution in porn; an industry that is thought to generate $100bn a year in revenues, twice as much as AI.

"People look at OnlyFans and they think it’s a creator platform,” says Thomas Smale, a broker for creator economy businesses and the founder of FE International, “but the money is really in payments on the back end. I don’t think it's a stretch to say this could one day be a bank with an adult content platform attached.”

OnlyFans has also become a fixture of the cultural zeitgeist, the latest example being Margot’s Got Money Troubles, an Apple TV show which explores the giddy highs and lows of an adult content creator who is raising a child.

But OnlyFans has had some money troubles of its own. In 2021, not long after the BBC and New York Times published investigations into alleged child sexual abuse material and alleged non-consensual content on the platform, OnlyFans announced it would ban explicit content entirely to comply with requests from its banking and payment providers. A creator revolt ensued.

“We received an email and I read it and thought, ‘you're an absolute joke, like that is your entire business’. They started advertising personal trainers on the platform and cooking shows,” says Ms Sophia Truee, a dominatrix and content creator who used to conduct business on OnlyFans. “You’re telling us that you’re no longer going to support us, even though we’ve built that platform.”

Within days, OnlyFans did a U-turn, saying that it had “banking partners’ assurances that OnlyFans can support all genres of creators”. It survived, but the episode exposed OnlyFan’s vulnerability on payments.

Since then, and perhaps as a result, efforts to bring outside investment into OnlyFans have stumbled. In 2025, a $8bn consortium bid orchestrated by LA-based firm Forest Road Company collapsed, with backers citing reputational and payment-rail risk.

Then, in March this year, Leonid Radvinsky, the majority owner of OnlyFans parent company Fenix International Ltd, died of cancer at the age of 43. His total ownership stake passed to a family trust led by his widow Yekaterina Chudnovsky.

Chudnovsky has since finalised a deal that was in progress under Ravinsky to sell 16% of the company for $535m to a group of investors led by Architect Capital. That valued the business at $3.1bn, a substantial discount on previous bids.

Adult entertainment is a place where institutional investors fear to tread. Architect, however, saw an underpriced asset. Towards the end of last year, it began pooling capital from multiple family offices (who tend to make their own moral judgments), as well as from Australian casino mogul James Packer, and Sam Lessin, a partner at the creator economy-focused Slow Ventures, into a special purpose vehicle.

Lessin is the husband of Jessica Lessin, founder of news site The Information, and an old friend and colleague of Mark Zuckerberg. James Packer is the son of Kerry Packer, media magnate and one of the largest landholders in Australia.

Architect’s founder, James Sagan, now holds a board seat. His niche is investing in “novel and under-appreciated assets”, and “harm reduction” businesses, including, most notably, the vaping company JUUL. Architect’s CTO is Hoan Ton-That, the co-founder and former chief executive of Clearview AI – a facial recognition startup that got into legal trouble for scraping images from the internet, largely without consent. More recently, he has led Architect’s foray into the world of private credit.

“I suspect, given the polarising nature of the platform and the high risk for Architect, they have more control than the 16% implies,” says Smale. “I would be asking for the right of first refusal on future raises and probably some form of exclusivity or control over payments.”

Architect’s vision? To tap its “experience in the financial services sector” to grow offerings to content creators “who are often underserved by traditional financial institutions and products”. That might one day mean offering loans, deposits, spending tools, even mortgages.

“Our mission has always been to empower creators and fans by providing a unique set of tools to create, monetise, and engage with content online,” OnlyFans chief executive Keily Blair told The Observer. “This strategic investment reflects our success in delivering this mission, and will enable us to build additional services and features to support our creator community and enhance OnlyFans’ position in the creator economy.”

OnlyFans’ pitch is to serve people the mainstream financial system has long neglected. One survey on financial discrimination and the porn industry found that 63% of sex workers have lost a bank account or financial tool because of their work.

Ms Truee has experienced it first hand. Soon after she started working in the industry in 2019, she says she experienced her first “debanking”, and decided to move her account to a major UK fintech. But years later, that bank started asking about where her income was coming from: “I was upfront, I was honest, like they asked. I provided everything they needed.”

It didn’t fly. The company gave her 90 days to move the money and then froze her account when she started withdrawing. The next platform did the same. And the next.

“I've complained to the financial ombudsman, and they’ve complained to the companies, and the FCA released a statement saying that they should not be discriminating against sex workers, but they don’t have to provide a reason as to why they shut you down, so technically it’s not discrimination, and sex work is not a protected characteristic,” she says.

Even now, Ms Truee has had no income coming into her personal business bank account since October. She is relying on savings. Often, she has to withdraw funds in crypto or euros, and that comes with additional transaction costs.

I ask her what she makes of OnlyFans’ plans to become a one-stop shop for creators. The answer is telling of her experience: “I wouldn’t trust it with a 10ft pole, honestly.”

FCA oversight will be essential if OnlyFans is to realise its banking dreams and, ultimately, progress to a mooted IPO in 2028. Currently, it has an exemption from the regulator owing to how it’s structured: users make payments directly to Fenix, not to the creators. Fenix retains a 20% commission and transfers the remaining 80% to the content provider. It doesn’t hold or manage those funds as a financial service, so isn’t regulated as one.

The other essential will be trust.

“If a creator builds their financial life inside OnlyFans – banking, payments, loans – and is then removed from the platform, what happens? What portability guarantees are you building in?” asks Jessica Van Meir, a sex work PhD researcher at Harvard and co-founder of MintStars, a UK startup positioning itself at the “ethical alternative” to OnlyFans.

It’s still early days for the real-life “Paypal of bukkake” and the company has yet to outline any new financial products. But it’s fortunate, perhaps, that OnlyFans is headquartered in London, widely regarded as the global capital of fintech services.

Clearly, there are more deals to be done and talent to be poached. But while it expands, OnlyFans would do well to remember one thing: the talent that helped to build it in the first place.

Photograph by Allyson Riggs/Apple TV+