Revver is the first new bank of 2019
09/07/2019
Revverbank has become the first new bank to be authorised by the Bank of England and Prudential Regulation Authority in 2019, having been granted ‘authorisation with restrictions’ late in June.
Based in Manchester, the bank was previously known as Ursa Finance, until it changed to its new name last month. It is run by Arpan Gautam with former Standard Chartered Bank Finance Director, Sandeep Jain as its Chief Financial Officer. It will offer property based commercial loans to start with, predominantly to businesses based in the north west of the UK.
The Bank has recruited Will Davies from One Savings Bank to lead its entry in to the savings market, where it will offer digital only savings with telephone support. It hopes to enter the market to savers late in 2019 offering a range of fixed rate deposits but will expand its offering to also serve SME depositors moving forward.
Revver is using Finastra’s cloud based platform and intends to be a bank focused on relationship building, technology and innovation with values of honest, humble, hungry and happy.
It is expected that Revver will be joined by Distribution Finance Capital, Allica (formerly Civilised Bank) and Zopa, who are also in authorisation with restrictions, by the end of the year. There is still a long queue of firms pursuing a banking licence with the likes of Recognise, Pepper Money, Model T Finance, BankNorth, Castle Trust, Belmont Green, LQID, ActivTrades and Bank of Dave amongst those. There are also strong rumours that JP Morgan are seeking to follow Marcus by Goldman Sachs in to the market and that it isn’t just the big banks looking at building stand-alone digital banks but insurance giant Aviva too.
Commenting on Revverbank’s license approval, Savings Guru Founder James Blower said “It’s great to see another new entrant come through the process and the appointment of a savings heavyweight in Will Davies shows some real intent. I expect to see some very competitive fixed rate bonds from them later in the year which, with FSCS protection, will be of great interest to savers.”