- OakNorth announced the Beta launch of its business banking tools to serve medium-sized businesses.
- The neobank is taking a high-touch approach by assigning an OakNorth team member to understand each client’s business and bring them the specific set of tools they need.
- OakNorth calls itself, “the neobank for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs.”
U.K.-based neobank OakNorth announced the Beta launch of its business banking offering this week. The tools are specifically aimed to serve mid-sized businesses in sectors that traditional lenders often overlook.
With its current offerings, OakNorth underwrites risk on these underserved businesses by leveraging commercial loan data that covers over 270 industries. This data-driven approach allows the company to serve a wider range of sectors and subsectors than traditional banks tend to serve.
OakNorth’s new business banking tools target the underserved group with a high-touch approach that will offer a simplified list of products and services suited to each business’ needs. To do this, the company will assign an OakNorth employee to engage with a business’ founders, CFOs, CEOs, and directors to understand their business and assess features that best suit the client. The aim of this approach is to eliminate noise caused by irrelevant products and features while offering the ability to scale as the business grows.
“OakNorth’s mission is to serve and empower businesses in the Missing Middle, ensuring each and every one of them has the right tools, insights, and support at every stage of their growth journey with us,” said OakNorth Co-founder and CEO Rishi Khosla. “We know from the last eight years of serving our customers that they don’t feel their banking needs are being met by incumbents or other neobanks. They continue to be overlooked and underserved, despite the significant contribution they make to the economy and local communities in terms of productivity, innovation, job creation, and GDP growth. Given ongoing economic challenges, it is essential that these businesses have the right banking partner to support them, and we are excited to step up to fill this need.”
OakNorth was launched in 2015 and calls itself, “the neobank for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs.” The U.K.-based company has raised $1 billion across nine rounds of funding. OakNorth’s most recent equity round took place in 2019 when it received $440 million in a round led by Softbank Vision Fund.