Barclays UK has established a new unit, Barclays UK Ventures, to focus on developing new business lines and promoting innovation.

Led by Ben Davey, formerly Barclays’ group head of strategy, it will have the mandate and space to find and develop opportunities both within and outside the bank. Those will then be captured through a combination of organic build-out, commercial partnerships and venture investments.

Davey and his team will work closely with the rest of the Barclays, whilst having a mandate to work semi-autonomously and pursue innovative and disruptive themes.

The plan is to leverage the latest technology and digital innovations through a rapid test-and-learn platform that will facilitate the development of new customer propositions and services that can be delivered quickly to the market.

The Ventures unit will work closely with third parties, whether through partnerships or by taking equity stakes in FinTech and other non-financial technology companies.

Ashok Vaswani, Barclays UK chief executive, said: “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.”

Davey added that he intends to drive this initiative by building a strong team of technologists, developers and entrepreneurs. “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 startup 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.”

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