The British Business Bank has significantly reduced its workforce as the government-owned economic development bank completed a major restructuring programme.
The bank, which supports loans from financial institutions to boost UK small business lending, confirmed in its annual report that “a number of colleagues were placed at risk under collective consultation.”
Around £9m was saved as part of the review process, with £6.3m of that figure coming directly from staff costs.
David Hourican, the bank’s finance chief, said the programme had removed around 15 per cent of its cost base, describing it as a meaningful reduction in the organisation’s overall expenditure.
He said the savings were made up of a “natural mix” of nearly 50 full-time employees exiting the business along with it “sharpening” its operating expenditure.
The bank recorded 604 full-time staff in its annual report as of March 2026, though Hourican noted this figure did not reflect the expiration of notice periods realised after the financial reporting period.
The number of temporary workers was also cut to 61 as of March, down from 85 the year prior, as the organisation pushed to reduce its reliance on contract staff.
Chief executive Louis Taylor told City AM: “We’re trying to diminish the amount of temporary resource that we have,” adding that “we’re running this to be efficient as well as to be effective.”
The savings from the review were earmarked to “enable greater investment into technology and automation,” according to the bank’s annual report.
Taylor outlined the strategic rationale, saying: “We should increasingly have systems that are scalable… so as we massively scale that, we should not be massively scaling the need for people in the back office, mid-office functions.”
As part of the restructuring, the bank merged its 20 separate financing programmes into distinct banking and investment divisions, simplifying its market-facing structure considerably.
Taylor said the bank was previously presenting the market with 20 programme names “that made no sense” and had criteria “that were repelling as much as they were embracing companies.”
He added that the organisation had transformed its internal culture: “We’ve changed the culture of the organisation to be more courageous and catalytic in the market, which commensurates with the ambition the government gave us.”
The state-owned body, which is owned by the Department for Business and Trade, had its funding capacity increased to £25.6bn in last year’s Spending Review, up from nearly £15.6bn previously.
In its latest financial results, the bank posted a pre-tax profit of £426m, a substantial jump from £144m the year prior, driven largely by a £422m positive turn in the valuation of its assets.
Around £194m of those gains came from the recovery of its venture growth portfolios, which had previously faced broader macroeconomic headwinds.
In January 2026, the bank committed to investing £25m in Kraken Technologies following the firm’s split from Octopus, signalling continued appetite for high-growth technology investments.
Taylor is set to step down as chief executive in September, with Hourican due to take over on an interim basis as the bank continues its transformation agenda.