BNP Paribas Personal Finance has opened its brand-new headquarters in Solihull, West Midlands.

The new office space is now home to 800 employees from the French bank's UK personal finance subsidiary.

The finance provider said that its decision to stay in the West Midlands and relocate to a new headquarters was a decision rooted in "strategic forecasting" based on its ambitious growth plans.

BNP Paribas Personal Finance has been located in Solihull for over 50 years, with the company growing its business to serve more than four million customers.

Since its launch in 1973 as Selfridges Finance Limited, it has created over 6,000 jobs across a variety of departments and supported over 300 partners, including John Lewis, Currys and B&Q.

The company, which has 1,000 employees in the West Midlands across three BNP Paribas entities, said that this trajectory of growth drove its relocation and a "substantial investment" of £3 million in the new location.

Speaking about the decision to remain in the West Midlands, Ricardo Mantovani, deputy chief executive of BNP Paribas Personal Finance UK, said: "Over the last 50 years, our organisation has gone from strength to strength and whilst we can attribute much of this success to the brilliant people who have worked at BNP Paribas Personal Finance UK during that time, it is also a direct result of being located in the West Midlands."

He added that the West Midlands has long been considered as one of the best regions to set up businesses due to its "thriving population, which is now the UK’s youngest and most diverse, and the ever-increasing number of businesses in the area".

The deputy chief exec said that the region now has over 200,000 businesses, which makes it the "ideal location" to take the business to "the next level."

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