Banking Competition Remedies Ltd (BCR) publishes progress updates
Progress updates for Pool A, B, C, D & F recipients
The Board of Banking Competition Remedies Ltd (BCR) today publishes progress updates for Pools A, B, C, D and F recipients, providing a summary of performance against their public commitments to the period 30 September 2022.
During this reporting period awardees have continued to deliver on public commitments and Starling Bank, ClearBank (CTBB), The Co-operative Bank, Codat (Pool D), Fluidly and Funding Options are close to deploying both CIF and co-investment spend by year-end. Market share of UK SME business bank accounts has continued to shift to a number of awardees with both CTBB and Starling each achieving over 8%. Others have been less successful in attracting SMEs who want to bank digitally and have, therefore focused more on attracting larger SMEs where they can provide most valuable support. These SMEs can be slower to switch banking relationships especially where there is a lending relationship in place and this is reflected in some cases where awardees, while making progress, are falling short of their ambitions. During this quarter more partners and relationships in the market have been forged namely iwoca, Funding Options, Swoop Finance (Flinke, Lloyds, BNP Paribas) and Cashplus Bank (mSix). Awardees progress against public commitments made can be found here.
As previously highlighted, in advance of monitoring progress after the CIF Agreements expire in December 2022, BCR has been working with all awardees to ensure that their targets are up to date. In this reporting period, six business cases from The Co-operative Bank, Atom Bank, Modulr, iwoca Fluidly, and Cashplus Bank were submitted and have since been approved. The Co-operative sought several year-end reductions to off-track KPIs. Atom’s proposal sought significant changes to its business case in relation to functionalities and delivery timelines which impacted KPIs, CIF and co-investment deployment and also led to changes to five Public Commitments. Modulr sought changes to replace some products for functionalities and features that will have a greater customer impact which has resulted in a 6-month extension to co-investment spend. iwoca requested changes to several year-end KPI targets where some original targets have been delayed until 2025. Fluidly’s proposal sought to utilise the remaining CIF grant combined with OakNorth Bank’s co-investment to deliver a new online journey for smaller SMEs looking for loans under £3m. Cashplus Bank revised its year-end customer acquisition target and realigned two off-track initiatives which have been delayed from Q4 2022 to Q1 2023.
A summary of performance against awardees public commitments can be found in the notes to editors, with links to the full updates provided below:
Pool A fourteenth quarter update
- Starling Bank Limited public commitment progress update
- Metro Bank plc public commitment progress update
- ClearBank Ltd public commitment progress update
Pool B thirteenth quarter update
- Investec Bank plc public commitment progress update
- The Co-operative Bank plc public commitment progress update
Pool C twelfth quarter update
- Atom Bank plc public commitment progress update
- The Currency Cloud Group Ltd public commitment progress update
- iwoca Ltd public commitment progress update
- Modulr Finance Limited public commitment progress update
Pool D thirteenth quarter update
- Codat Limited public commitment progress update
- Fluidly Limited public commitment progress update
- Form3 Ltd public commitment progress update
- Funding Options Limited public commitment progress update
- Swoop Finance Limited public commitment progress update
Pool F fourth quarter update
- Cashplus public commitment progress update
- Codat Limited public commitment progress update
- Swoop Finance Limited commitment progress update
As part of BCR’s role in monitoring the way that organisations are using the funds, BCR holds awardees to account on their progress against business plans which includes regular meetings with all recipients. For more details on how BCR monitors CIF awardees see here. The final progress updates as per the CIF Agreement for all Pools and awardees will be in February 2023. After this, where awardees have remaining commitments to deliver, they will be monitored informally by BCR.
