The Board of Banking Competition Remedies Ltd (BCR) today announces the results of the Capability and Innovation Fund Pool A grant process.

The Capability and Innovation Fund Pool A is designed to promote competition in the market for banking services to SMEs in the United Kingdom through expansion of each successful applicant’s business capacity, product offering and/or target markets. 

BCR’s assessment and decision-making processes have been completed on time and adhered to the assessment criteria. Consideration by the BCR Board included any existing business current account offerings and how each business case facilitated the development of more advanced offerings of business current accounts and ancillary products for SMEs in the United Kingdom.

The grants which have a combined value of £280 million are awarded as follows:

An award of £120 million to Metro Bank PLC

An award of £100 million to Starling Bank Limited

An award of £60 million to ClearBank Ltd 

The three successful applicants will shortly be invited to enter into a Capability and Innovation Fund Agreement with BCR.

As part of the application process, each organisation has provided commitments stating what it will deliver with these funds. These can now be found at https://bcr-ltd.com/reports-statistics/.

Godfrey Cromwell BCR’s Chairman said: “These awards seek to increase competition in the business banking market and to improve the financial products and services available to SMEs. Following the successful launch of the Incentivised Switching Scheme by BCR last year, Pool A is the first group of grants from the Capability and Innovation Fund. Further grants (Pools B, C and D) will be awarded later this year.”

BCR received a total of 16 applications from 6 applicants for the Pool A process during an application window between 1^stNovember 2018 and 31^st December 2018.