Banking Competition Remedies (BCR) has announced the firms sharing the £80 million pot from its Capability and Innovation Fund (CIF) Pool E.

Virgin Money gets a grant of £35 million, ClearBank has been given £25 million, while Ebury Partners and MarketFinance get £10 million each.

The successful applicants will shortly each be invited to enter into an agreement with BCR. As part of the application process, each applicant provided public commitments stating what it will deliver with the CIF funds.

The second application period had 78 completed applications in total.

Aidene Walsh, lead director on the CIF workstream, said: “While it’s a tough economic environment for both financial providers and SMEs, we’ve seen many examples throughout this application process of companies demonstrating innovation in putting the evolving needs of SMEs at the heart of their propositions.

"Our successful applicants have carefully considered the impact of COVID-19 on their delivery timelines and, in their solutions, have evidenced a strong focus on digitisation of the SME journey, cash flow optimisation, harnessing alternative approaches for lending solutions and offering more international trading options for SMEs."

As with each previous CIF pool, BCR engaged business and technology consultancy Baringa to receive and analyse the applications via a rigorous and detailed process. BCR’s evaluation team decided which applications should be recommended to the BCR Board for consideration and final decision.

BCR retains a focus on monitoring and compliance of all funding recipients once funds have been awarded. Progress against each applicant’s public commitments will be updated on a quarterly basis with the first reporting update due in January 2021.

BCR chair Richard Anderson added: “We know that the winners and all SMEs in general face challenging times as we head towards winter with both the pandemic and the resulting economic challenges ahead.

"For that reason, it has been exciting to see a very wide range of innovative approaches from so many applicants to supporting all sizes of SMEs in their banking needs - it has been difficult to narrow the awards down to a small number of outstanding winners and BCR looks forward to monitoring progress as they implement their programmes."

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