ClearBank

ClearBank is a UK clearing bank providing agency banking, embedded banking and transaction banking to acquirers, banks, building societies and credit unions, corporates, digital asset platforms, fintechs, non-bank financial institutions and firms that are not yet regulated.

Serving other banks is what distinguishes ClearBank and it describes a different layer of the system. Agency banking means providing clearing and settlement access to institutions that hold their own customer relationships but do not have direct access to the payment schemes, which is the position most building societies and credit unions are in. Being useful to those institutions requires a different standing from serving fintech startups.

Pre-regulated firms as a named customer type is a thoughtful inclusion. A company applying for its own authorisation needs banking arrangements during the application period, and finding a bank willing to serve a firm in that state is genuinely difficult, which is exactly when the relationship is most valuable.

Digital asset platforms are named separately, and that also reflects a real gap: crypto businesses have found UK banking access persistently hard to obtain, so a clearing bank explicitly serving them addresses a recognised problem rather than a hypothetical one. Documentation and regulatory and governance material are published openly. Rates are not published.