EXCLUSIVE: “Raising the Phoenix” – Ad van der Poel, HSBC Innovation Banking in ‘The Fintech Magazine’

Two years on from Silicon Valley Bank UK’s assimilation into HSBC, Ad van der Poel, Chief Commercial Officer at HSBC Innovation Banking UK, shares its journey to becoming the go-to bank for the nation’s tech ecosystem

Founded in California in 1983, Silicon Valley Bank Financial Group became the financial partner of the innovation economy in the US. By 2022, it provided banking services to over half of the country’s venture-backed technology and life science startups, as well as their venture capital and private equity investors – a sector considered too high risk by many traditional banks.

The same year, its UK branch, which had been operating since 2012, became a wholly owned subsidiary, such was its success in providing a crucial banking infrastructure to startups who struggled to open accounts with high street banks, typically due to their high cash burn profile and lack of historic accounts. That desperate need for specialist banking services to serve the UK’s tech entrepreneurs didn’t disappear when the financial dominoes began falling spectacularly in March 2023.

The potential impact of the now well-documented collapse of Silicon Valley Bank on its UK subsidiary was starkly illustrated by a lightning survey conducted by the UK Business Angels Association when the bank here began to teeter. The survey, which informed crucial rescue decisions over one very tense weekend, revealed that 61 per cent of UK startups banking with SVB UK didn’t have access to other banking facilities at the time.

Despite the rise of challenger banks, it was obvious that SVB UK was at the heart of an interconnected funding system with a highly concentrated customer base of investors and innovators. As such, it was systemically important to the UK tech economy and couldn’t be cut adrift. The UK tech ecosystem held its breath while officials worked with regulators to facilitate a transfer of SVB UK to a private buyer by market open at 7am on Monday, March 13.

That buyer was HSBC.

One hundred days later, HSBC Innovation Banking came to life as a new brand – a phoenix from the ashes. It continues to serve a concentrated customer base in life sciences and healthcare, as well as in high-growth technology sectors such as fintech, enterprise software, climate tech, consumer tech and frontier tech, the last of which includes AI and quantum enterprise software. HSBC Innovation Banking is part of HSBC Group, bringing together HSBC’s worldwide reach and the strength of its balance sheet with the former SVB UK team’s unique understanding of the tech startup ecosystem.

Customer-first approach

The speed and intensity of the upheaval two years ago was undoubtedly painful for all concerned. Ad van der Poel, now Chief Commercial Officer at HSBC Innovation Banking UK, had barely been in post six months at SVB UK when the unthinkable happened. But he says the existing team’s ‘long-standing relationships’ across the innovation ecosystem – from clients, to partners and influencers – helped everyone navigate the transition together, including a migration to a different online banking environment and internal systems.

These close-knit relationships and additional resources have enabled HSBC Innovation Banking to take an agile approach that’s closer to its startup clients’ mindset than that of the legacy bank behind it. The strategy was to literally build a bank around them.

“As you can imagine, our clients are slightly different from the normal HSBC clients, so we had to focus on the customer experience and the customer journeys,” explains Van der Poel.

This customer-first mindset leads every decision – from product development to marketing. Even the organisational structure reflects that – both of those disciplines, for example, are combined into one team to more effectively translate client insights into tools. These learnings also influence ‘how we market – and how we go to market’, notes Van der Poel.

Leaning into open banking

The SVB experience, perhaps inevitably, prompted startup and investor clients to reconsider their approach to banking and risk. Van der Poel observes they are increasingly taking a more prudent approach by using multiple banks for their services, which is made easier now by APIs and open banking. HSBC Innovation Banking is leaning into that.

By leveraging HSBC’s open banking architecture and, more specifically, a mature set of treasury APIs, HSBC Innovation Banking has access to greater capabilities and a more ‘robust proposition’ than SVB UK ever had. That means HSBC Innovation Banking can not only provide a seamless experience for clients who are operating across multiple bank accounts, but it can also fine-tune each customer’s journey as their business grows, and give potential investors a window into an investee’s financial position.

“For investors, HSBC Innovation Banking offers innovative banking solutions, leveraging APIs and connecting fund managers to a virtual account system, giving them direct, near-real time insights into a company’s payment flows and providing increased control and visibility,” says Van der Poel. “These insights are aided by their portfolio companies also banking with HSBC Innovation Banking.”

HSBC Innovation Banking continues to support businesses at the start of their journey with basic banking services, such as payments and credit cards. However, as they raise capital and scale internationally, they develop more complex needs, such as cross-currency transactions and confirmation of payee in international payments. And, if you’re a startup in the fintech category, your demands are likely even more complex.

“Our fintech clients also use our APIs to offer propositions to their clients, and if they connect it to a virtual account platform, it almost creates a wallet-like situation,” says Van der Poel. “So there is ongoing development in that space, and it’s exciting to see where it’s going to take us.

“Previously, clients would maybe connect with the bank once a day or once a week, but now it’s every 15 or 30 seconds. The more usage, the better, really. That shows the success of the APIs.”

Supporting the UK funding landscape

While not an investor in startups, HSBC Innovation Banking offers a range of scalable lending solutions to help startups grow at every stage of the company life cycle. “From pre-seed all the way up to Series A, B, C, and potentially IPO and post-IPO when they become a corporate client,“ says Van der Poel.

This long-term support is a differentiated offer in an innovation ecosystem that has been criticised for adopting overly complex ‘piecemeal’ initiatives that fail to give scaleupsa coherent pathway of financial support as they grow. In fact, a government report in February 2025 warned that the UK risks becoming an ‘incubator economy if we don’t take action to support our tech companies to scale up’.

HSBC Innovation Banking is demonstrating its commitment to that tech ecosystem with a flurry of activity, including £30million of debt financing to fintech ClearScore and £20million to healthtech Numan, as well as record onboarding of new clients.

Ecosystem impact

Two years since the fall of SVB, the fundraising environment has only become more difficult for investment hopefuls as investors’ risk appetite hardened in the wake of continued economic instability. Few investors today consider a startup to be investable without a proven concept, commercial traction or – in the case of later-stage companies – progress since their previous funding round. The investment journey can be even more complex for life sciences and technology companies who require significant capital for R&D and face a long runway to revenue.

Van der Poel vows to continue to support these clients, developing increasingly fine-tuned customer journeys that help them ‘get the best out of innovative ideas’ and championing their success. Just two years on from that fateful weekend in March, he is realistic about the progress made and the hill that HSBC Innovation Banking still has to climb.

“We should not think that we are the core business of our clients: we are serving them to get the best out of their innovative ideas, but the bank will be more integrated into their core business. What success looks like is that our clients become bigger than us and are enormously successful themselves.

“We need to be the easiest bank for them to use, almost without them even realising that they use us,” he adds. “We have a long way to go, but I think we’ve come a long way.”

This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue #36, Page 24-25