OakNorth Bank

OakNorth Bank Limited^[1]

Type	Private limited company
Industry	Banking
Founded	2015 (2015) London, England
Founders	Rishi Khosla Joel Perlman
Headquarters	OakNorth Bank Limited Nightingale House 65 Curzon Street London W1J 8PE England
Key people	Lord Turner (Senior Independent Director)[1] Cyrus Ardalan (Chairman)[1] Robert Burgess (Non-executive Director)[1] Lord Maude (Independent Adviser)[2]
Products	Business Loans Property Development Finance Deposits
Website	www.oaknorth.com

OakNorth Bank Limited is a specialist bank in the UK that lends between £1m to £20m to mid-sized growth businesses and entrepreneurs.^[3][4][5]

The bank, which gained regulatory approval in early 2015,^[6][7] was borne out of the negative experiences its founders - Rishi Khosla and Joel Perlman - had in trying to secure growth capital for their previous venture, Copal Amba.

History

OakNorth Bank secured a full banking licence from the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in March 2015 and began deposit taking and lending six months later in September.^[8][9]

The Board is chaired by Cyrus Ardalan, former vice-Chairman of public policy and government relations at Barclays Bank; and includes Lord Adair Turner as a non-executive director.^[10]

Indiabulls Housing Finance Limited, India’s largest non-bank lender to small and mid-sized companies,^[11] invested £66 million in OakNorth Bank in November 2015, which increased the bank’s capital base to £85 million.^[12][13]

In May 2016, it became the first bank in the UK to have its core system fully hosted on the cloud after working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to drive the development forward with the regulator.^{[14][15][16][17]}

In August 2016, the bank completed its largest deal to date (£19m) with LEON Restaurants, enabling the fast food chain to open 50 new stores and create 1,000 new jobs by 2020.^{[18][19][20][21][22][23]}

In September 2016, within a year of launching, the bank announced that it had broken even.^{[24][25][26][27][28][29][30]}

Operations

The Bank provides business loans of between £1m to £20m and provides property development finance, property investment loans, and savings accounts. The bank considers stock, debtors, fixtures and fittings, plant and machinery, intellectual property, and real estate as collateral.^{[31][32][33][34][35]}

It has offices in London, Manchester^{[36][37][38][39]} and New Delhi.^[40]

References