Business banking for Yorkshire

Head of Regional Banking (Yorkshire), John Bullock, explores the Virgin Money business banking offering in Yorkshire

Commitment to our Customers

This year we have launched Virgin Money Business which will bring together the expertise and experience of our three heritages of Yorkshire Bank, Clydesdale Bank and Virgin Money under a single brand.

In Yorkshire, we continue to have our team of dedicated and highly experienced relationship managers catering for a full range of businesses from SMEs, to large companies and we remain committed to supporting our business customers within the county.

Virgin Money Business however allows us to grow the scope of our local offering and to focus on tackling more real customer problems.  We have spoken to customers to understand what their pain points are and customers told us that they often have difficulty in managing disparate pieces of financial and business information to make sense of where their business is.

Customers also felt they needed greater assistance in understanding their Environmental, Social, and Governance impacts and goals. To tackle these key issues, we have partnered with a number of organisations to create solutions for customers.

Sustainability Matters

More and more we see conversations turning to sustainability as an issue that all businesses – from farming to manufacturing to professional services – need to face into. For many of our customers, knowing where to start can be a big hurdle. This is why we have partnered with the Future-Fit Foundation, a non profit organisation to help businesses, especially SMEs, to identify and prioritise the sustainability issues most relevant to them.

Using Future-Fit’s methodology, we have worked together to develop a learning and assessment tool which measures and tracks an SMEs ESG progress and offers guidance on ways to improve. The Virgin Money Sustainability Benchmarking Tool identifies the areas a business should consider and provides an overview of a company’s current ESG impacts. It then provides a score and guidance to help make improvements and it’s been designed to be completed over time, encouraging businesses to track their progress.

It takes around 20-30 minutes to complete and it’s not just available for Virgin Money customers so go ahead and see the progress your business is making here.

Building Back Digital

At Virgin Money, our aim is to shake up the business banking market and as we look towards recovery, we want to ensure that we act as a trusted partner to our customers to build back better by improving the banking experience. This year, we will launch our new business current account proposition, and we have been working with a range of fintechs to create a market-leading proposition.

When speaking with customers, they talk openly about the fact that they manage lots of disparate information when running their businesses and need to bring all of this together to make sense of where they are.

We know this takes a lot of manual effort, so we have been working to bring together this information and data into a personalised dashboard to prioritise the information they need most. When launched, this dashboard will give businesses the information they need to focus on improving productivity and growth.

Earlier this year we also announced our partnership with Virgin StartUp, to support entrepreneurs across Yorkshire and the UK with a wealth of insights, tools and mentoring on how to run a business.

We have been running monthly digital MeetUp events where attendees can hear from inspiring founders on a range of topics and also can ask questions. The partnership is giving customers unique access to a network of more than 90,000 founders, which is invaluable insight for businesses, and we’re excited to see the difference we can make together.

Find out more

To find out more about our business banking offering in Yorkshire, please contact the Head of Regional Banking (Yorkshire), John Bullock on 07730 540867.

Our sustainability web page and further information on our partnership with Future-Fit can be found at virginmoneyukplc.com/corporate-sustainability/future-fit/