Condé Nast and Deloitte Digital have teamed up to present Digital Acceleration in the Time of COVID, a nine-part series of stories from global business leaders who've charted a path through uncertainty.
Here, David Thomasson, Chief Commercial Officer at Metro Bank describes the do-or-die moment when they realized: you can’t be a community bank without a community.
The financial services industry isn’t exactly known for its intimacy. On the face of it, that’s not surprising: banking is often an opaque topic for the average person, and people tend to avoid—if not fear—what they don’t understand.
The United Kingdom’s Metro Bank was founded in 2010 to address this disconnect. Metro Bank prides itself on offering excellent customer service, as well as strengthening and servicing the communities in which it operates. It‘s a bank uniquely focused on human connection and people-first service. Its stores—what Metro Bank calls its branches—are open later and longer, offering instant card printing in-store, product simplicity and a range of educational services for school-age children. Metro Bank consistently works on a local scale and zigged where others zagged.
With the help of Deloitte, Metro Bank spent its first ten years refining its business model. Do good met good-for-business, and Metro Bank was doing well—particularly in serving an overlooked segment of the UK market: small businesses.
“It’s a space where, traditionally, they’ve been very much underserved by the major incumbent banks that dominate the UK financial services industry,” says David Thomasson, Metro Bank’s Chief Commercial Officer.
The return on these investments was recognized in early 2019 when Metro Bank was awarded more than £120m of funding from the Capability and Innovation Fund, designed to shake up the status quo and offer fresh alternatives in the business banking market.
Rapid Reactions, Bouncing Back
The COVID-19 pandemic hit Metro Bank’s customer base especially hard; with communities suddenly frozen in place by rolling lockdowns, small businesses faced severe and potentially crippling challenges around safety, supply logistics and above all cashflow. For Metro Bank—an organization built on human connection—these unexpected crises were so much more than a business problem. They were a mandate to act.
Thomasson and the wider team at Metro Bank immediately looked for ways to serve these struggling communities and support them when they needed it most. The bank kept its store network open later and longer than competitors, maintaining late opening hours even during lockdown whilst adhering to the UK government’s latest coronavirus guidance. Metro Bank even safely opened two new stores during the pandemic, with its newest store in Cardiff, Wales offering a drive-thru service that allows customers to carry out cashier services from the comfort and safety of their cars, completely contact-free.
David Thomasson
Chief Commercial Officer, Metro Bank
In April 2020, the UK government launched a range of new schemes as part of an ambitious fiscal plan including bounce-back loans (BBLs). The BBLS program would give businesses on the verge of collapse near-immediate access to up to £50,000 of government-backed loans.
It was a welcome ray of light for tens of thousands of small businesses across the UK, many of whom were in desperate need of capital. But there was a catch: creating a loan program isn’t the same thing as making it available to the business community. With few banks able to extend BBLs on such short notice, many small businesses were staring down bankruptcy.
Cue Metro Bank. This was essentially what the bank was made for—reacting quickly and intelligently to empower the communities it serves.
The stakes were high; you can’t be a community bank without a community. Metro Bank already had a small business loan project in development, but it just wasn’t built to serve BBLs. Unsure of exactly how many small businesses might be seeking funding—but convinced of the imperative to do so—Thomasson and the Metro Bank team doubled up with Deloitte and got to work.
“We knew there was a huge demand from our existing customer base,” Thomasson says. “Therefore, we took the decision not to spend more time building and solving a wider set of problems, and instead kept it really tight—'minimal viable product’ sort of language—to start getting as many customers as we could through the pipeline, quickly and securely, in order to help them out.”
And it was quick: the team brought a fully functional BBL solution to market in just five weeks. In more than 90 percent of cases, a small business could complete a five-minute application and have funds in their account in 24 hours. “We were one of the only service providers out there providing a fully digital, end-to-end solution for existing customers to apply for a bounce back loan,” Thomasson says.
Unsurprisingly, the market demand was staggering. Thomasson initially projected a few thousand applications. Other estimates were lower. But the quality of Metro Bank’s solution, paired with a growing infection curve, compounded the need.
Even today, Thomasson seems a bit awed by the scale of traffic he saw when the site launched. “We had more than 2,000 people across the site in just the first minute.”
A few months on, and Metro Bank had serviced 36,000 government-backed loans – of which a large majority were bounce-back loans – totaling £1.5billion. The UK’s small business community suddenly had a lifeline. Small businesses like Daisy’s Dog Empawrium, that used its BBL funding to rapidly pivot to an e-commerce model, or Lexi’s, that quickly found a new online audience for their low-calorie and allergy-friendly healthier treats. All thanks to a small, dedicated team of thinkers and doers at Metro Bank—an organization built for its community.
“We’re looking at maybe less than 20 people that have made a huge, huge difference,” Thomasson points out. “It was not perfect—we should not kid ourselves. In the true agile fashion, you get out there as fast as possible, and immediately iterate on it as much as possible. But all the gates were open. There was never a ‘we have this other project on’ mentality.”
People Powered
By the end of 2020, Metro Bank was one of the largest BBL lenders in the country, with the impact of its solution as profound for the bank as it has been for the community of 36,000 businesses that have benefited from its government-backed loans. The UK government has been among those appreciative of their work under challenging circumstances.
True to its mission, the biggest impact Metro Bank has made is at the human level. Despite the challenges of the past year, Thomasson is optimistic about the future. “What I will say is Metro Bank has always been a service-led, people-first organization. That has always resonated well, and that's why we've grown from where we were 11 years ago to where we are today. We've brought community banking back to the fore and stayed true to what we stand for, even during tough times.”
“And there’s still so much more that we can do.”
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