Building a bank…

Building a business is one hell of a challenge, so when Nick Ogden (yes, the founder of WorldPay) said to me that he wanted to build a bank, I was a little apprehensive. But before I could really respond, Nick explained that he didn’t just want to build a bank, he wanted to build the UK’s first Clearing Bank in 250+ years!!!!! I think most people would be intimidated, however, we felt that this was one of those rare opportunities that you get to re-imagine how an entire suite of services could be delivered. Back in 2015, this was the birth of Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS). 

TYou see, Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) is a technology play, it’s middleware, its banking deconstructed and delivered in granular, individual services. Plug them together, build our your capabilities and you can start to deliver banking outcomes for your customers. But Banking-as-a-Service, BaaS, is more than just technology, it’s leveraging all aspects of banking, including your balance sheet and more….

Banking-as-a-Service I feel really was born in that room with Nick Ogden back in 2015. This really was the start of our journey, the journey of building out ClearBank. Not only have we built the first Clearing Bank in 250 years, it’s the first Clearing Bank ever to join the UK’s main payment schemes all at once, the first ever to build out its own technology and the first ever to be built completely with Cloud technologies, and the first true provider of Banking-as-a-Service. A quite a few firsts there….

At the UK’s Azure User Group, I talked about some of our journey, some of the challenges and actually, how would I build a bank today…You can view the video here….