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People will all know about the Bank of Dave, but no-one has made a Netflix dramatisation of the story of the challenger bank OakNorth. Yet.

Maybe Rishi Khosla and Joel Perlman don’t have the same plucky underdog persona as Dave Fishwick, the Burnley businessman who wanted to launch the Burnley savings and loan, and fought the behemoths of the banking world, becoming a Lancashire folk hero and the subject of a Netflix series in the process.

Yet OakNorth, which calls itself “the digital bank for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs” lays claim to “empowering” the lower mid-market (businesses with £1m-£100m turnover) to support growth, prosperity, and innovation for the benefit of all.

It was founded in 2015 by Khosla and Perlman after they had successfully sold Copal Partners, a financial data analytics company, to Moody’s in 2014. In securing a new banking license in the UK, it was only the third bank to have done so for 150 years.

To date, to fund the business, as well as investing their own capital, OakNorth has raised over $1bn from world-renowned investors including Softbank, GIC, Toscafund, Clermont Group and SMBC.

Rishi and Joel

Since then OakNorth has since lent over £12bn to the “missing middle” the bedrock of the UK economy, which it claims has directly helped create 56,000 new jobs and build 34,000 new homes in the UK, but always sticking to the fundamental purpose it was set up for: to empower the lower mid-market (businesses with £1m-£100m turnover) to support growth, prosperity, and innovation for the kind of business it says is routinely underserved or overlooked by traditional banks: what they call “scale-ups.

Khosla and Perlman, experienced just how out of touch the mainstream banks were getting when they were scaling their previous company, Copal. In 2005, three years after launching the business, they applied for a bank loan and they got the “computer says no’’ response, despite the business being profitable and having strong cashflow. It sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale story that would indeed make a great start to a film, but as entrepreneurs, their natural response was to build that digital bank for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs, ensuring businesses like theirs get the products, services, and experience they need to succeed and scale.

Since inception, and the clue is in the name, OakNorth has had dedicated operations and customer services teams in the North, first in Manchester where it has expanded its team and capabilities in the city, including with several debt finance directors and associates.

To read the full interview with Stewart Haworth at OakNorth, subscribe to Rainmakers.