The Bank of London is set to enter the UK's clearing market with a pre-revenue valuation of $1.1 billion and plans to recruit 3000 staff over the five years.
Founded by Anthony Watson, a former chief information officer at both Nike and Barclays, The Bank of London has received its first bank licence as the 6th principal clearing bank of the UK - becoming only the second new clearing bank in more than 250 years.
The bank has raised $120m to date, and its latest $90m funding round was led by New York-based investor ForgeLight, with follow-on investment from existing backers 14W Venture Partners and Mangrove Capital Partners.
Ceo Watson says: "We've spent over four years working quietly in the background, bringing together veteran banking experts, leading creative innovators and visionary technologists to build, patent and validate truly game-changing technologies and innovations to transform the very fundamentals of banking."
The new bank will operate on three fronts: taking on established banks in the market for clearing and settlement; delivering transactions banking services for the corporate market; and fielding a banking-as-a-service offfering for companies wanting to embed payments in into thier products.
The group has hired Harvey Schwartz, a former president and chief operating officer at Goldman Sachs, as chariman. He says the new bank will wake up the sleepy worlds of clearing and global transaction banking.
"During the great financial crisis, I saw first-hand how the legacy payments, clearing and settlement processes that are at the heart of the global financial system contributed to bringing the world's economies to their knees, through their inefficiencies and inherent liquidity risk," he says. "Fundamentally, banking is basically an immensely complex data problem. The Bank of London is the solution. And our unique solution is simplicity."