Metro Bank plots growth of RateSetter brand
Metro Bank has revealed plans to use the RateSetter brand on aggregator and direct channels in a bid to significantly increase lending volumes.
Speaking to Christer Holloman for Fintech Futures, the challenger bank’s banking products and digital managing director David Thomasson said the firm expects comparison websites to become increasingly important across the unsecured lending space.
Metro Bank increased the size of its consumer loan book by two thirds last year, in its second full year since completing its acquisition of RateSetter in September 2020.
The challenger bank reported earlier this month that its consumer lending grew by £590m to £1.480bn last year and now makes up 11 per cent of the total loan book, compared to seven per cent in 2021.
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Thomasson talked about the speedy process for the RateSetter deal, after identifying the peer-to-peer lender as “the ideal acquisition target”.
“The bank was eager to have a successful consumer lending business on its books and, after confirming how much it would cost to develop this capability in-house, it decided the best way to achieve its aim was to purchase a successful consumer lending business already active in the market,” the article said.
There was a gap of just weeks between the deal completing and Metro Bank-funded lending going live on the RateSetter platform in October 2020.
Thomasson told Holloman that retaining a strong commercial focus on the objective of diversifying and growing the bank’s revenue streams was key to the acquisition’s success.
As with most mergers and acquisitions, there were lessons to be learnt on the integration journey, with the bank’s initial plan to allow various functional teams to develop their own individual integration designs scrapped in favour of a more efficient top-down approach.
Thomasson reflected that the bank could have more effectively used its cross workstream approach for the integration of functionalities, which would have reduced silo issues.
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