Global Fintech Interview with Valentina Kristensen Director at OakNorth

OakNorth was founded in September 2015 with one fundamental purpose: to serve and empower small-to-medium sized businesses (£1m-£100m turnover) that were seeking to scale but were routinely underserved or overlooked by traditional banks: what we call "scale-ups". As entrepreneurs, their response was to build the digital bank for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs, ensuring businesses like they had been get the products, services, and experience they need to succeed and scale.

What's your core offering?
Today, our core offering is focused on two areas - we offer a range of easy access, notice, fixed-term, and cash ISA savings accounts to retail customers, which help fund the other part of the business - commercial lending. We provide loans of £250k up to tens of millions of pounds to businesses (£1m-£100m) across a variety of regions and sectors. In the latter part of last year, we also began lending to US businesses, completing about $200m of lending there and we hope to continue building on this. We also announced last year, the broadening of our core offering to include a range of additional banking products and services for businesses - current accounts, savings cards, credit card, FX, payments, etc. This is still very much in beta phase, but we hope it will become a core part of our offering in the future.

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What makes OakNorth different from other fintechs / digital banks?
Several things:

The part of the market we're focusing on - i.e. scaling businesses with £1m-£100m turnover. Most other fintech are focused on retail customers or small/micro businesses or start-ups.
The way we service our customers.