This article was originally published by Mortgage Introducer on 14 August 2026.
Recognise Bank’s CEO on transformation, turning a loss-making challenger profitable, and what the decisive bank means for brokers.
Simon Bateman has spent nearly three decades transforming banks from the inside. Systems, cost bases, platforms, governance structures, each role a variation on the same instinct. Find what is broken, fix it, change it again if the fix does not hold. Abbey National/Santander, Lloyds Banking Group, Aldermore, Harrods Bank, Allica Bank, Nomo Fintech. A career that, as he puts it, only makes sense in hindsight.
“It’s only when you go through this process of having conversations with people that you realise I’ve just transformed stuff my entire career,” he told Mortgage Introducer.
In November 2024, that instinct landed him in the chief executive’s chair at Recognise Bank, a specialist lender serving small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through intermediaries. The bank was loss-making, mid-restructure, and working from a finite capital base. Bateman describes what he walked into as a startup that needed restarting.
Eighteen months later, Recognise Bank’s full-year results for the year ended 31 March revealed the bank had posted a post-tax profit of £8.9 million, swinging from a £5.3 million loss the prior year. The loan book grew 51% to £461.9 million over the same period, with originations reaching £307 million. Since the year end, the loan book has grown beyond £500 million, and deposits have exceeded £600 million.
A career built on change
Bateman began his career at Abbey National – later absorbed into Santander – where he stayed for nearly 20 years, running technology infrastructure, IT cybersecurity functions, and major integrations across a succession of acquisitions. Approaching 40, he hit what he describes as a glass ceiling and moved to Lloyds Banking Group.
From Lloyds he moved to Aldermore as transformation director, then to a divisional CIO role, before a stint as CIO at Harrods Bank ended when the business was sold to Tandem. He joined Allica Bank as employee number eight, taking it through its regulatory permissions and into launch, with Nomo Fintech his final stop before Recognise.
“It’s a case of accepting that change is something that has to happen,” he said. “From very early on in my career, it was a case of how do I make things more efficient? If it works, fantastic. If it doesn’t work, let’s change it again. That’s not for everybody, lots of people don’t like transformation, but it’s what my career has been from the outset.”
What did it take to turn Recognise around?
Bateman’s first moves at Recognise were structural. He rebuilt the executive team, bringing in a new chief risk officer, chief commercial officer, and chief financial officer alongside existing members, and deliberately recruited people with startup experience. He opened an operations centre in Milton Keynes and began a technology platform refresh, all while growing the loan book.
“I purposely went out with a view of bringing in people that worked in a startup before, because we are wired slightly differently,” he said. “Having worked in huge financial institutions and smaller ones, it’s the approach and the attitude of the leadership team that makes the difference.”
The board-approved strategy set a break-even target for September 2025. Recognise reached it in May, four months ahead of schedule. The National Association of Commercial Finance Brokers reported in March that its members arranged £33 billion of lending to SMEs in 2025, a 25% year-on-year increase, underscoring the scale of the intermediary market Recognise is competing in. Brokers placing specialist SME lending business are increasingly active, and lenders that cannot process deals quickly risk being bypassed entirely.
“The thing that throttles and kills a startup’s agility to be successful is unnecessary governance and putting in place a level of red tape that suffocates you,” Bateman said. “We’ve iterated the governance framework as we go. It wasn’t a case of putting a framework in place and that’s how we operate.”
What does ‘the decisive bank’ mean for brokers?
In June, Recognise launched a brand refresh, positioning itself as the decisive bank – a concept Bateman argues is less a marketing claim than a description of how the turnaround was actually achieved.
“When you start to look at what brokers, intermediaries want, they want a decision, they want it quickly, they don’t want to be messed around,” he said. “Therefore, it became a logical step to join the internal passion of the business with an external desire from the market.”
In practice, that means a fast yes or a fast no. Recognise operates entirely through the intermediary channel, with no direct-to-consumer business, and no plans for one. As the UK’s broker-led SME lending market continues to grow, Recognise is positioning itself as the lender that will look at deals larger institutions cannot, and say so faster.
Where is Recognise Bank headed next?
Recognise relaunched its unregulated bridging product in November and December 2024. Regulated bridging is next, planned for the coming financial year. According to data from the Bridging and Development Lenders Association, the UK bridging market exceeded £13 billion in annual lending in 2025, with regulated bridging accounting for approximately 14% of that total – a segment Bateman sees as a natural extension of existing skills. For brokers handling complex cases in the regulated bridging space, Recognise intends to be a lender that works around complexity rather than turns it away.
“We do want to make it as streamlined, as automated as possible,” he said. “But ultimately, there is still going to be an underwriter who will validate those deals. We won’t move away from that human interaction, that human judgment.”
The recent appointment of Julian Sawyer, formerly of Starling Bank, as a non-executive director signals the shift from startup to scale-up. Bateman is explicit about why that experience matters now.
“By getting Julian on board, it reemphasises that scaling approach that we are now going to take,” he said. “It adds to the toolkit that we have around the table to make sure that we don’t trip ourselves up and make mistakes that others have made before.”
The bank had targeted full-year profitability in 2027 and has arrived there ahead of schedule. For Bateman, the pride is real, but so is the awareness that the harder work lies ahead.
“The journey’s only just begun,” he said. “What we’ve proved to ourselves in the last 18 months, I couldn’t be prouder of what we’ve achieved. But it’s only just the start, and it’s the next part of the journey which is what I’m really excited about.”
