Originally written by Timothy Adler on Small Business
Ian Rand, chief executive of Barclays Business Banking, looks down from the 30th floor of his Canary Wharf eyrie in headquarters and sighs.
Rand, the personable boss of SME lending, who has been with Barclays for over a decade, worries that there is a huge divide between most small businesses and the white-hot tech startups raising millions in the City of London beyond his window.
“A typical business is not a fintech in Shoreditch,” he says. “A typical SME is a man or a woman in a white van, with a single shop where they’re struggling to pay the rent and the rates, and they’re finding it difficult to get someone to man the till on a Saturday.”
The ex-army officer, who spends a lot of time on the road speaking to business owners (“Norfolk, Wales, Leicester and Sunderland,” he says, recounting where he’s been to in the last couple of weeks), is responsible for over one million Barclays Business Banking clients. Businesses range in size from startups through to companies with turnover of up to £10m.
Barclays, which currently has a 24pc share of the business banking market, offers a network of 1,500 relationship managers at