Rishi Khosla and Joel Perlman had already built and sold a company — Copal Amba, a financial research firm — before they founded OakNorth, and the origin story is a grievance rather than an insight. While scaling Copal, they had tried to borrow against a profitable, growing business and been turned down by every bank they approached. The businesses in that gap — turnover between roughly £1 million and £100 million, too large for small business lending products and too small for corporate banking attention — became OakNorth's entire market when it launched in September 2015.
The bank's answer was a credit process built around understanding individual businesses rather than scoring them against a template. Its proprietary analysis platform assesses borrowers in the context of their sector and forward-looking scenarios, and — since 2024 — explicitly models potential AI disruption to a borrower's business in the credit decision, which is an unusually forward-leaning thing for a lender to underwrite against.
The numbers are the point. OakNorth reported pre-tax profit of £223 million in 2025 on gross revenue of £605.9 million, following £214.8 million in 2024 and £187.3 million in 2023 — three years of double-digit profit growth from a bank barely a decade old. New loan originations rose 33% to £2.8 billion, the total facilities portfolio reached £7.2 billion, and cumulative lending has passed £12.5 billion with an adjusted return on equity of 22%. It ranks among the top 1% of banks globally on return on assets, paid its first dividend in 2024, and does it all with a headcount in the low hundreds. Lord Adair Turner, the former FSA chairman, is chairman.
The current strategic story is American. OakNorth entered the US in mid-2023 — timing that coincided with the regional banking crisis and the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, whose UK arm OakNorth had bid for — and the US accounted for 40% of new lending volume in 2025. Khosla has said publicly that the US business is on track to overtake the UK portfolio within a year. A pending acquisition of Community Unity Bank, subject to regulatory approval, would give it US banking permissions directly. That makes OakNorth the counter-example to a pattern this directory keeps documenting: while Wise, bunq and Monzo have struggled or failed to establish US banking positions, OakNorth built a lending business there first and is buying its way to a licence second.