Pre-revenue unicorn are the only words, I remember from the launch of “The Bank of London” a few years ago.
The company is back in the news as its founder has stepped down to be replaced as CEO by its head of compliance, HMRC temporarily gave a winding-up order to its main subsidiary which the company blamed on an “admin error” that it had addressed, and with the rumours that “The Bank of London” was running out of cash, it announced a funding round of £42m. This feels like a company that probably doesn’t deserve the amount of attention it is getting but I couldn’t help going onto the company’s website to learn more about its differentiation as one of a small number of UK clearing banks.
The company’s marketing video ticks all the boxes that Silicon Valley wannabes like but left me none the wiser! It did however give me some tips about how to do a video if I ever need to raise funding for a speculative start-up…
It starts with the founder Anthony Watson saying “There is a secret right at the heart of banking” (this reminded me of a certain British newspaper columnist who said just before the UK election “Whisper it, but Rishi Sunak is making an extraordinary comeback”)….then looking out from a skyscraper at the skyline of London and saying: “The Bank of London started with one simple question, the system is broken how do we fix it.”
Then we move over to former Goldman Sachs big dog Harvey Schwartz, the Chairman of The Bank of London talking about the 2008 Financial Crisis, how everything is interconnected, and how banking impacts the man on the street. Schwartz dressed impeccably sits in front of a fantastic view of Central Park with a handkerchief sticking out of his suit jacket pocket.
Then we pivot to a series of The Bank of London executives talking about what was until recently “a closed club.” The video quickly pivots to the 4th different “The Bank of London” executive sitting with their trademark of a handkerchief sticking out of his suit jacket pocket who rolls out the customary analogy that we have all seen dozens of times in those VC tech pitches…
But it wasn’t the Airbnb or Uber of banking..the executive says he calls the pain point “the nightclub issue”…then we get videos of nightclubs with the voice overlay:
“yes, if you go to a nightclub and you got lousy music and lousy drinks…you still go because everyone else is there”
This is followed by legacy banks “would be changing the engine of an aeroplane mid-flight” with an old video dating back to just after the Wright Brothers
The next Bank of London executive says about legacy banks “They didn’t innovate…and frankly we live in a free market society and, in a free market society problems get solved by innovators”
The founder comes back with words like…next generation and “unique patented innovations”
Then the baton is handed over to The Bank of London’s main VC who rolls out the usual we will reduce costs by 80-90% line and when you tell customers this the door becomes wide open…
The big finale is the founder Anthony Watson saying “one of the many failures of the global banking industry is that they only really ask themselves one question and that question was where will the future of banking take us when they really ought to have asked themselves where will we take the future of banking, that’s what we are here to solve at the Bank of London”
MIC DROP…alas I still don’t understand what The Bank of London’s exact differentiation is!
For those of you who want to watch the whole video…
…The Bank of London: Home
The Bank of London Video Who We Are (youtube.com)