Barclays has set up a new venture capital arm headed by the ex head of strategy.
The Barclays UK Ventures team will be led by Ben Davey and will seek to add “a significant new revenue stream” by the middle of the next decade.
According to a statement issued by Barclays, the ventures arm will seek to accelerate the growth of new business lines within the bank, by working independently of traditional business units.
It will also look to develop new customer propositions around major areas of disruptive technology.
In both cases, the firm says it will look to work closely with third parties “whether through partnerships or by taking equity stakes in FinTech and non-financial technology companies”.
Ben Davey, CEO of Barclays UK Ventures, 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. Our ability to support this development through targeted commercial partnerships and equity stakes in strategic technology partners will also help ensure we deliver best in class solutions to our customers, whilst helping our partners develop and grow.
“The way we will work as a team will look and feel very much like a start-up or scale-up operation, so that we can move at pace in order to realise and deliver long term value for Barclays customers and shareholders.”
Ashok Vaswani, Barclays UK CEO, went on to say: “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 has long been at the forefront of technology in banking that adds value and convenience for customers and Barclays UK Ventures will take this work to the next level combining our main strengths of agility and scale. We are a growth business and Ben’s appointment will put real weight behind this new unit to provide new lines of