Rishi Khosla led OakNorth aims to double its headcount   

INDIAN origin co-founded OakNorth Bank is on its way to double its staff count after signing an agreement to provide its credit analysis and monitoring platform to The Netherlands based NIBC Bank.

In its first public enterprise-wide partnership since launching a licensing strategy in 2018, Rishi Khosla led firm has inked a five-year deal to provide its technology platform to the Dutch lender.

The British financial technology firm helps small medium enterprises (SMEs) to secure debt finance.

London based company will support the lender in searching for new possibilities in its lending to medium-sized firms.

OakNorth said that its workforce has grown from just below 300 in February to 520, with IT professionals, credit experts, product designers, and others among those recruited.

The firm claims that it is growing by around 15 people a week.

Khosla said that his firm will ink deals with new banks in the near future. He was quoted by the Telegraph: "We are already engaged with several others, we have nine to 10 banks that engage with us around the globe. We are at different stages with those banks."

The British firm aims to expand its business in the US, continental Europe and ‘two to three’ Asian markets. The business is also planning to increase the number of its staff members rapidly.

OakNorth is valued at $2.8 billion with a £338m funding round backed by Japan’s SoftBank.

It has also tripled its profits from £10.6m in 2018 to £33.9m.

In the UK, OakNorth has lent circa £3.3bn to hundreds of businesses. It has received about £600m of repayments and a large proportion of borrowers are now repeat customers, according to Khosla.

These loans lent have directly helped with the creation of 10,000 new homes and 13,000 new jobs across the UK, OakNorth claims.