For 250 years, only four banks controlled who got to move money in the UK. Then, in 2017, one entrepreneur decided that was long enough.
Three engines, one banking licence
ClearBank makes money through recurring platform fees, per-transaction payment fees, and a spread on interest earned by holding client funds at the Bank of England. It's a three-legged model, and none of those legs works alone; the fees only exist because fintechs trust ClearBank with their customers' deposits, and the interest only exists because those deposits sit somewhere entirely risk-free.
How ClearBank makes money has changed more in the past two years than in the seven before that: in 2024, fee-based income grew 63% to £53.3 million, while the business deliberately reduced how much it leant on interest income. That shift is really the story of how ClearBank makes money today, versus how it made money three years ago.
ClearBank's revenue shift, at a glance:
Note: 2023 predates ClearBank's Group-level reporting structure, so some rows aren't directly comparable; the table shows what was actually disclosed for each year rather than filling gaps.
Why Fintechs never had to become banks
Fintechs don't need their own banking licence because ClearBank already holds one, and lets them plug into its infrastructure instead of building their own. That's what is ClearBank, stripped of the jargon: it's the plumbing, not the tap. Tide is a useful example: it's an FCA-regulated electronic money institution, not a bank, and by using ClearBank's underlying accounts it can offer interest-bearing, FSCS-protected products it couldn't offer directly under its own electronic money institution permissions.
ClearBank was founded by Worldpay creator Nick Ogden and quietly developed from 2014, before launching publicly in 2017 as the fifth clearing bank in the UK and the first newly licensed one in 250 years joining Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and NatWest, none of which had seen a new competitor in that time. Unlike them, ClearBank doesn't lend and doesn't take retail deposits.
It connects directly to Faster Payments, Bacs and CHAPS, and client sterling balances are held at the Bank of England, while euro balances are held through ClearBank Europe with the European Central Bank. No legacy core. No branch network. Just infrastructure, built to be plugged into.
That's the ClearBank business model in its purest form: don't compete with your clients, become indispensable to them instead.
The fees: what's charged, and why it's growing fastest
ClearBank earns platform fees for the accounts it hosts and transaction fees for every payment that runs across its rails, and fees are now the fastest-growing reason ClearBank makes money at all. Fee-based income comprising recurring platform fees, payment fees, and ClearBank's internally reported spread-based fee income (a fixed-spread component of interest income) grew 63% to £53.3 million in 2024. By 2025, statutory net fee income made up 46% of total Group revenue, with net fee growth of 38% that the business is explicit and doesn't depend on interest rates moving in its favour.
The volume tells the same story. ClearBank processed 167 million payments in 2024, up 55% year-on-year, then 262 million in 2025, up another 57%. Every one of those transactions, and every account behind them, carries a fee.
Embedded Banking fees specifically are tied to two things: how many accounts a partner onboards, and how much money moves through them. More Tide customers, more Revolut savings pots, more transactions, more fee income, without ClearBank taking on a shred of credit risk.
The float: earning interest on money at rest
ClearBank earns interest by holding client GBP funds at the Bank of England and euro funds at the European Central Bank, then capturing a spread between what it earns there and what it passes back to clients. This is the float and for a few years it was, honestly, how ClearBank made money more than anything else.
When rates rose, interest income grew 142% to £81.9 million in 2023, as deposits more than doubled to £6.1 billion in the same period. Every fintech company using ClearBank got to offer genuinely competitive, FSCS-protected savings rates without ever touching a banking licence themselves.
But a float built on interest rates is a float that can fall as fast as it rose, and ClearBank knows it. Deposits kept climbing regardless of £10.8 billion by end of 2024, then £17.8 billion by end of 2025 but management has openly been steering revenue away from rate sensitivity and toward fee income instead. It's a rare admission from a bank: our best year of interest income was also the year we started planning to need it less.
The partners riding ClearBank's licence: Tide, Chip, Revolut
Embedded banking is how ClearBank lets other companies offer FSCS-protected, interest-bearing bank accounts under their own brand, without ever becoming a bank themselves. Tide, Chip and Raisin were the first three partners, together processing average monthly transaction volumes above 10 million by 2023. The client list has only become more recognisable since then.
Revolut was onboarded in 2024, alongside Capital on Tap and Wealthify, pushing the number of FSCS-protected end-customer accounts to 1.7 million by year-end up from 1.2 million in 2023. By 2025, ClearBank had added LemFi and Coinbase, deepened its work with Revolut, and watched Capital on Tap's savings product cross £1 billion in deposits within twelve months of launch. Tide alone now serves nearly 800,000 SMEs on ClearBank's infrastructure.
Independent research backs up the pitch: a Forrester study found ClearBank's Embedded Banking delivers a 90% return on investment for the partners that adopt it, partly through service-desk savings as customers self-serve more. That's the quiet appeal of the ClearBank business model to a founder: you get a banking product without the years of licensing, and ClearBank gets paid every time your customer uses it.
Crossing the Channel, and away from interest rates
ClearBank is expanding into Europe because the same infrastructure logic that worked in the UK travels well, and because fee income scales more predictably across borders than a UK-only interest float ever could. It secured its European banking licence from the European Central Bank in July 2024, launched shortly after with six live clients, and by the end of 2025 had grown to 28 European clients across 21 EU countries, with a new branch in Paris and €44 million in European deposits.
The financial picture across 2024 and 2025 makes the strategic pivot explicit. Group normalised revenue rose 34% to £121.6 million in 2025, and the UK business alone posted a 53% jump in pre-tax profit to £12.2 million its third consecutive profitable year. CEO Mark Fairless has framed the past two years as building "a more efficient and scalable business model that stands the test of time," which, translated, means: less exposure to what the Bank of England does with rates, more revenue that ClearBank controls through its own product and pricing.
Conclusion
How does ClearBank make money?
By charging fees for the infrastructure, fintechs can't be bothered to build, and by earning interest on the deposits it's trusted enough to hold. Ten years ago, that trust didn't exist; a new clearing bank hadn't launched in the UK since before the Napoleonic Wars ended.
Now it underpins Tide's business accounts, Revolut's savings products, and Chip's ISAs, while quietly shifting its own centre of gravity from interest income toward fee income as it scales into Europe. The ClearBank business model was never about being a bank people bank with. It was about becoming the bank the banks bank on.
FAQs
1. How does ClearBank make money on interest?
ClearBank holds client GBP deposits at the Bank of England and earns interest on them, keeping a spread between that return and what it passes to clients. Interest income hit £81.9 million in 2023 as deposits crossed £6.1 billion, though the company has since been deliberately reducing how much it relies on this income stream.
2. What is ClearBank embedded banking?
Embedded banking is ClearBank's service letting partners like Tide, Chip and Revolut offer FSCS-protected, interest-bearing bank accounts under their own brand, without holding a banking licence themselves. Fees are charged on accounts onboarded and payment volumes processed, and the partner base has grown from three founding clients to nine by 2025.
3. What is ClearBank?
ClearBank is the UK's first newly licensed clearing bank in 250 years, founded by Nick Ogden and launched in 2017. It doesn't lend or hold retail deposits directly; it provides the regulated banking infrastructure that lets fintechs access UK payment schemes and offer banking products without a licence of their own.
Also Read: UK ConTech: The £145bn Industry Still Running on Delivery Notes
Sources: Data drawn from ClearBank's own Annual Reports and Accounts (2023, 2024), ClearBank press releases and results announcements, and reporting from FStech, FF News, Financial IT, FinTech Magazine, City AM, and Forbes. Figures reflect the most recent available data at the time of writing.
The EP+ Editorial Desk covers UK startups, founder stories, and venture capital. All editorial content is independently produced and human-reviewed before publication.
