When ClearBank launched in 2017, it set out to solve a specific problem: fast-growing digital players were hitting a brick wall when they reached the “hard bit” of banking: clearing payments and opening accounts through legacy stacks at a handful of incumbent clearing banks. ClearBank’s answer was to become the first new UK clearing bank in centuries, built cloud-native and API-first.
“We built ClearBank because fintechs and even banks were hitting the same wall,” says Emma Hagan, UK CEO. “Traditional banks had great customer propositions, but accounts and payments remained a pain point for the new digital native players. We do the difficult end, so that our clients can focus on front-end innovation.”
From powering the likes of Tide, Coinbase and Chip, ClearBank now works with more than 250 institutions, processes hundreds of millions of payments each year and holds more than £15 billion of customer balances. It announced UK profitability in 2022. A year later, it launched in Europe with a Dutch licence and is considering where to expand next, with a view to the US.
The product thesis that still compounds
Hagan describes ClearBank’s technology strategy as “build-buy-partner”: keep development core differentiators in-house; find best-in-class partners for the rest.
“We built the technology ourselves with a team committed to the vision,” says Hagan. “At the time, there were no cloud-based banks connecting to payment systems the way we did.”
That architectural choice is still compounding today. Mark Fairless, ClearBank’s new group CEO, frames it as the key to scalability. “The principle is one unified platform, wherever we operate. Clients shouldn’t feel a difference between UK, Europe or other future markets. There’s no legacy complication and we intend to keep it that way.”
Our clients drive the roadmap. We co-create, pilot, get feedback and adjust. That way we’re shipping what adds value, not chasing shiny ideas
Emma Hagan
The second growth engine came through its embedded banking proposition, designed to empower fintechs to design best-in-class client experiences. Tide became the flagship partner and has now captured a significant share of the UK small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) banking market.
ClearBank achieved this while ensuring that funds are transferred and held with the highest levels of security. “We hold deposits at the central bank and provide accounts that benefit from FSCS protection, so customers know their money is safe,” says Hagan. “That model allowed our partners to compete on equal terms with incumbents.”
Embedded banking now represents a substantial portion of ClearBank’s business. Partnerships with digital asset platforms such as Coinbase and Kraken extended the same infrastructure to digital asset firms, where resiliency and trust are at a premium.
Fairless calls this “the hard bit at the end of the chain”. He adds: “What fintechs want is to grow. What they don’t want is to build banking infrastructure. That’s our job.”
Next up, corporates
The next chapter in the UK is about corporates. High-volume enterprises – marketplaces, platforms, even established brands – increasingly need banking functionality embedded into their flows. For treasurers, the priority is less about speed to market and more about resilience, reconciliation and real-time visibility.
It is not just about better payments pipes. When you weave accounts and payments into the user journey, it helps drive retention and proposition differentiation. Our technology is designed to give corporates the real-time updates, resiliency and automation that they just can’t get from legacy setups,” Hagans explains.
We’ve built a high-trust, collaborative culture. The challenge is to keep the best bits as we grow
Mark Fairless
ClearBank’s international strategy is pragmatic: follow clients into new markets. Europe was the obvious first step, since many UK customers also operate there. In the 12 months since gaining its Dutch licence, ClearBank has passported into 15 countries, enabling it to offer euro accounts and Sepa payments across Europe, with plans to expand coverage across the entire region.
Fairless explains the logic. “Our clients needed the same standard in Europe as they had in the UK,” he says. “And because we can now serve UK and EU together, we’re the partner of choice of larger institutions who want fewer, more capable partners.”
The US is likely next, with ClearBank exploring routes to obtain a licence or other options. “We’re looking to give our customers access to dollars and US rails through the same unified platform,” Fairless adds.
Scaling without losing the core
With more than 800 staff and an increasing footprint, ClearBank now faces the classic fintech dilemma: how to keep innovating while scaling.
Hagan says it starts with discipline. “Our clients drive the roadmap,” she says. “We co-create, pilot, get feedback and adjust. That way we’re shipping what adds value, not chasing shiny ideas.”
Fairless points to culture. “We’ve built a high-trust, collaborative culture,” he says. “The challenge is to keep the best bits as we grow. We have to keep our infrastructure’s resilience and the customer experience while volumes grow by triple-digits.”
ClearBank’s model carries lessons for transaction banking – how the traditional model can be reimagined. “Our ambition is to be the leading global provider of embedded banking and clearing solutions,” says Fairless. “That means geography, corporates, product depth and staying ahead on technology. But it also means executing without building the complexity we set out to remove.”
ClearBank’s first act powered the UK’s fintech boom. Its second act will be judged on whether the same playbook – resilience and client-led expansion – can reset expectations in corporate treasury and scale across currencies and continents.
