New bank open for business to provide funding help for SMEs

Cambridge & Counties Bank, which is jointly owned by Cambridgeshire Local Government Pension Fund and Trinity Hall, a College of the University of Cambridge, launched yesterday.

It says it will provide SMEs with loans secured against commercial property as well as “a highly competitive deposit account”.

It says it will also offer secured pension scheme lending, and has plans to launch professional firm financing, as well as other competitive savings accounts into both the retail and non-retail sectors.

Gary Wilkinson, chief executive of the bank, said: “We’ve got our heartland regions of Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire, and certainly the initial plan is for those to be the areas we will particularly focus on from a direct lending perspective, and by direct I mean that we will have a sales force that will be concentrating on those areas and proactively dealing direct with SMEs.

“However, we are open for business nationally, so we will also be looking to, through a series of commercial brokers, which we haven’t finalised yet... lend throughout the country and that will include Yorkshire.”

Loans will be between £50,000 and £1m, and Mr Wilkinson said that once a loan application is in, the bank will give “a decision in principle within 48 hours”.

He said: “We have been able to build a very strong and experienced management team, and launch at a time when many robust SMEs are finding it difficult to secure finance. There is also a real need for increased competition in the banking sector.”

Meanwhile, a US-based bank dedicated to supporting firms in the technology sector yesterday opened its first UK branch, in the City of London.

Silicon Valley Bank, which claims to back more than half of all venture capital-backed technology and life science firms in the US, including software giant Cisco, said it was the first US bank to open a commercial branch in the UK for several years.