Barclays UK Creates New Venture Unit To Develop New Business Lines

Barclays UK has created a new venture unit to develop new business lines and promote innovation.

The new unit, Barclays UK Ventures (BUKV), will leverage the latest technology and digital innovations through a rapid test-and-learn platform to develop new customer propositions and services.

BUKV will be headed by Barclays Group former strategy head Ben Davey. He will also become the member of Barclays UK’s executive committee.

The new unit will speed up the growth of new business lines within the bank through taking management support.

BUKV will also engage in the development of new customer propositions across major areas of disruptive technology with focusing more on aligning new business propositions with people’s major life choices.

The new unit will work with third parties through partnerships or by acquiring equity stakes in fintech and other non-financial technology companies.

Barclays UK CEO Ashok Vaswani said: “We live in a very exciting time for our industry where the deployment of new technology is making new business models and partnerships possible for the first time.”

Barclays UK Ventures CEO Ben Davey said: “Barclays has a history of generating great innovative business ideas and at BUKV we will focus on incubating those ideas and accelerating them into meaningful new business lines.

“We intend to drive this initiative by building a strong team of technologists, developers and entrepreneurs within BUKV, mandated to operate independently of, but in partnership with, our core operations.”

Barclays is a transatlantic consumer and wholesale bank that provides products and services, including personal, corporate and investment banking, credit cards and wealth management.

In May 2017, Barclays opened a new innovation site in London’s Shoreditch to serve as co-working space for FinTech startups, corporate clients and other experts to develop new financial services.

The Rise London site, situated at 41 Luke Street, is said to accommodate around 40 FinTech companies, as well as banking and technology teams from Barclays.

Image: Barclays head office in London. Photo: courtesy of Secretlondon.