ClearBank reaches profitability as revenue climbs to over £45m
UK fintech ClearBank, the enabler of secure accounts, real-time clearing, and Embedded Banking for financial institutions, today announced that it has reached profitability. ClearBank has generated £45.4 million in revenue YTD and from October has reached monthly profitability in the UK.
The fintech bank has nearly tripled its 2022 YTD revenue compared to the same period last year. And FY2021 was the second consecutive year that ClearBank’s revenue grew by over 100%. Growth has been driven primarily by growing transaction volumes, new customers, interest income, and the ramp-up of the bank’s new FX and multicurrency proposition.
ClearBank now supports over 200 financial institutions, including Chip, Raisin, and Recognise Bank. With 17.5 million bank accounts and £3 billion held in balances, ClearBank has dramatically increased in scale.
ClearBank’s continued growth has been spurred on by the permanent move towards digital payments which has been heavily influenced by the Covid-19 pandemic shift in how people and businesses move money. This shift has meant a greater use of contactless, online, and mobile wallet channels at the expense of cash, all driving up payment volumes. Despite increasing headwinds from wider market conditions, ClearBank anticipates continued and sustainable growth.
Additionally, there is a growing demand for cloud-based, API-fluent banking infrastructure in the UK. ClearBank’s single API cloud-native Embedded Banking platform allows financial institutions and fintechs to offer regulated financial products and services rapidly and seamlessly to their customers without the cost and complexity of building it themselves. ClearBank’s unique combination of fully licensed banking services with a next-generation clearing and Embedded Banking means that the company has seen success with emerging e-money institutions, fintechs, mid-market players, and mature financial service providers.
To support the expansion of its clients internationally, ClearBank also launched its international proposition which includes multi-currency accounts and international payments in 11 currencies and 65 FX currency pairs. It now also offers a Faster Payments Originating Overseas product to enable its partners to use Faster Payments to process GBP payments that have originated outside of the UK.
“In the last few years, we have seen the market shift from agency banking services to BaaS and now Embedded Banking driven by the demand from institutions and increasingly brands to integrate sophisticated and regulated financial services into their customer offerings,” said Charles McManus, CEO at ClearBank. “As the macro-economic environment continues to be turbulent, there is a renewed focus on the security, resilience and utility offered by fully licensed banking products that unlock the potential of businesses and their customers while ensuring peace of mind.”
In March 2022, ClearBank announced a £175 million strategic investment led by funds advised by Apax Digital, the growth equity arm of Apax Partners LLP, a leading global private equity advisory firm, to accelerate ClearBank’s international growth and expand its range of product and services. ClearBank’s existing investors CFFI UK Ventures and PPF Financial Holdings also participated in the round. This growth and expansion, coupled with a healthy client pipeline and an expanding deposit base, has accelerated the firm’s profitability in 2022.
McManus is confident that today’s environment is uniquely primed for the company’s breadth of offer, saying, “With a licensed clearing and Embedded Banking platform that is scaling rapidly, we expect to build on the success of 2021, and our accomplishments thus far in 2022, ahead of expansion into Europe in 2023 and the US soon after. The market is coming to ClearBank.”
