How these ambitious British businesses broke the £250m-revenue barrier

Zopa

Few companies have pivoted quite as well as Zopa. Starting out 20 years ago as the world’s first peer-to-peer lender, the London-based fintech wound up this operation in 2021 after transforming itself into a digital bank – jumping through all the hoops necessary to win a full banking licence from the Financial Conduct Authority.

This change of direction was spearheaded by chief executive Jaidev Janardana, who feared that the tough regulatory environment was making it hard for peer-to-peer lenders to grow.

Janardana’s timing is interesting. Zopa began rolling out personal loans, credit cards and car finances in June 2020, soon after the start of the Covid pandemic. Yet by the end of last year, the bank had around 1.4 million customers, lending more than £10bn and taking in more than £5.5bn of deposits.

Partnerships with Britain’s largest electricity supplier Octopus Energy and the retailer John Lewis have helped boost revenues. Growth over the past three years has hit 674 per cent, with revenues at £588.9m.

Zopa, which owes its name to an abbreviation for the lending jargon “zone of possible agreement”, plans to launch current accounts later this year and Janardana is on a mission to grow the customer base to 5m by 2028. A stock-market float remains on the cards.

Bayford Group

We’ll never know quite what the founders of Bayford Group would make of the technologies this Yorkshire-based business has been investing in over the past decade.

A group of former soldiers from Leeds who fought in the First World War set up the business in 1919, naming their outfit after the Hertfordshire village where their military service officially came to an end when they were “demobbed”.

Bayford began by selling and delivering coal. By the 1960s, the Wetherby-based group had moved into oil distribution and petrol retail, before pushing into property and hospitality.

Jonathan Turner led a family buyout of the other shareholders just over 20 years ago and has since driven the company into new areas. Bayford has become a major shareholder in Raw Charging, a fast-growing network of electric vehicle chargers now found at shopping centres, National Trust properties and other family-friendly attractions such as Thorpe Park and Chessington World of Adventures.

Turner has also led the move into software used in smart meters, heat pumps and other green infrastructure through an investment in Jumptech, a Cambridge-based tech firm. Plus, Bayford has a 30 per cent holding in Fulcrum, a Sheffield-based firm helping design and maintain data centres and electric vehicle charging points. It’s all a long way from coal but it is paying off, with revenue growth at 145 per cent over the past three years.

HydraB

Jo Bamford could have spent his career working at JCB, the construction equipment behemoth built up by his father Lord (Anthony) Bamford. But instead of selling those iconic yellow diggers, the younger Bamford is building up a stable of green businesses under the HydraB banner.

So far, he is best known for buying the bus-maker Wrightbus in 2018. Many of the Northern Irish manufacturer’s vehicles are now powered by either hydrogen or electric batteries.

Oxford-based HydraB also wraps in hydrogen distributor Ryze Power and Hygen Energy, an H2 producer. “I first started talking about hydrogen in 2019, and ever since then, we’ve been steadily building a network of companies who can get this industry on its feet,” Bamford has said.

“Now we are focusing on the infrastructure to bring it all together … we are putting the ecosystem in place to help businesses realise that hydrogen is a vital part of the UK’s energy mix.”

His father certainly seems to agree. JCB has so far invested more than £100m in a range of hydrogen combustion engines at its plant in Derbyshire. Its growth also shows its success, with revenues up 193 per cent to £290.9m over the past three years.