With just shy of 85,000 customers, it’s very far from the biggest bank. Nor is it rich: its 2021 profit of £7.8m would barely cover the reward package of a high-street bank’s CEO.
Yet Bristol-based challenger Triodos Bank UK, the embodiment of an upsurge in consumer demand for ethical banking, is making the incumbents look like dinosaurs – and not the peaceable herbivorous kind. Since its establishment in 1995, it has become a star player in a national “ethical money sector” that the Ethical Consumer Research Association valued at £41.1bn in 2018.
If scandals such as the Panama, Paradise and Pandora papers hadn’t already done enough to highlight the less-than-ethical actions of many large financial institutions, the recent freezing of billions of pounds in Russian oligarchs’ UK bank accounts has rammed the point home. So says Bevis Watts, CEO of the business, which is a subsidiary of 42-year-old Dutch plc Triodos Bank.
“The train had already left the station before the Ukraine conflict,” he observes. “It is good that all this stuff is being exposed, because now we can have a proper public debate about where our money should sit and how it should be used.”