Anthony Thomson, the serial entrepreneur behind Metro Bank and Atom Bank, has revealed the name of his new proposition for family offices.
The new lender has been known as Family Office Bank or FOB since it was announced in August. However, its official name will be Velorai, Spear’s can exclusively reveal.
The name, which has roots in both Latin and Greek, is designed to evoke the new bank’s values of ‘integrity, endurance, longevity’, Thomson said.
The venture, for which Thomson and his co-founders are currently fundraising, is a response to deep dissatisfaction among family offices with the service provided by their banks, Thomson explained.
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In some 72 interviews with single-family office principals, multi-family offices and family office advisers that he carried out as market research, Thomson said that product-pushing – when banks encourage clients to purchase investment products – emerged as ‘the single biggest issue’.
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‘Without exception, the number one complaint is: “All my bank wants to do is sell me investment products, and often their own structured investment products. Or, if they show me deals, I’m pretty sure I’m the last person to be seeing the deal”,’ he said.
‘What people like about their bank, you could fit on the back of a very small postage stamp – which is great if you’re thinking about setting up a competitor.’
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The second most common complaint among those he interviewed was that the level of service promised when they joined their bank had not been delivered. Many family offices feel as though they are dwarfed by institutional clients and are therefore too small to matter very much to their bank, said Thomson. ‘If you’re a billion-plus, you probably have some weight. But even if you’re in the hundreds of millions, [the banks] are just not very good,’ said Thomson, while noting there were some ‘honourable exceptions’.
Speed of response is another frustration for family offices, according to the entrepreneur.
One family office reported needing a $30 million credit line to take advantage of an opportunity. They offered to secure the debt with a $120 million publicly quoted share portfolio, but the decision from the bank took six weeks, Thomson said, by which time the opportunity had passed.
The ‘multi-jursidictional’ and international nature of family offices and the members of the families they serve is another stumbling block for many traditional lenders, Thomson noted.
He posited a theoretical example of a family office based in Turkey, connected to manufacturing plants in Eastern Europe, with a patriarch and matriarch that want to help their grandson to buy a house in Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera. In the example, the family want to fund the purchase with a mortgage, even though the grandson himself has no income.
More traditional banks and non-bank lenders alike ‘would look at that and go: “How on earth could we do that?”,’ said Thomson. ‘They’re not able to see the whole picture.’
Velorai aims to offer improved service through its incentives for staff and its use of technology. Rather than earning commission for products sold, relationship managers will be rewarded according to two key metrics: customer satisfaction and overall bank performance. Velorai will also be able to provide better-value products through its cost-saving use of technology, including agentic AI, Thomson said.
Thomson has been involved with a string of banking startups. He co-founded Metro Bank alongside the colourful US billionaire Vernon Hill in 2010, attracting attention for consumer-friendly touches such as opening on weekends and having dog bowls and treats in branches. Thomson left Metro Bank in 2013 and co-founded the tech-forward Atom Bank in the same year. In 2019 he co-founded Australian digital bank 86400, which was sold to National Australia Bank for A$440 million in 2021.
One of Thomson’s Velorai co-founders is Paul Pester, the former boss of Virgin Money and TSB. Pester left the latter under a cloud after a mis-handled IT upgrade left 1.9 million customers locked out of their accounts in 2018.
The other co-founder, Stuart Grimshaw, will serve as CEO. He is a former chief executive of Yorkshire Bank and Clydesdale Bank and has worked in Australia where he was at Commonwealth Bank of Australia and the listed Humm Group. Grimshaw is also chairman of the Melbourne-based family office of the billionaire Roche family.
The team is currently in fund-raising mode, seeking to tap the same UHNWs and family offices that will make up its client base for investment. ‘You don’t have to be a shareholder to be a client,’ said Thomson, ‘but if you are, you will share an economic value that you’re helping to create. And that message seems to have resonated really well.’
Velorai’s current pre-money valuation is $20 million. The bank intends to close an initial $20 million round in December from investors who would be given a 25 per cent discount on the next raise, according to the Times. Most of this has already been committed, according to Thomson. The bank will seek an additional $80 million ahead of its official launch, which is slated for September 2026.
Thomson’s ambition is to get to a $10 billion balance sheet within five years, which would require $500 million of capital in all, with the additional $400 million raised over the intervening years.
‘We’d probably have about 500 family offices and about 2,000 ultra-high-net-worth individuals,’ he said. ‘It’s not a big market share.’ There are currently 510,810 UHNWs globally, with the number projected to grow to nearly 677,000 by 2030, according to Altrata.
Jersey has been chosen as the location of the bank’s headquarters and is also where it will book assets. Thomson, who has worked on projects with connections to the Middle East, said that other jurisdictions, including Singapore, Luxembourg and the UAE had been considered.
Both ADGM and DIFC, the financial centres of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, respectively, were possible locations at one stage, but were eventually discounted. Thomson described both as ‘good centres’ but added: ‘When I spoke to family offices in the UAE, they said, “Any assets we’ve got offshore – i.e. Out of the UAE – we want to keep them out of the UAE.”
‘If the [ruler] decided to change the rules tomorrow, the rules would change.’
Jersey was ‘an obvious candidate’, owing to its stability and familiarity with family offices. ‘It’s not for me to prejudge a regulator, but we’re pretty sure we’ll have our banking licence in Jersey by December,’ Thomson said.
Then it will be a small matter of creating the bank of the future and raising an additional $480 million. ‘It’ll take us a period of time to build up those relationships and to build up that trust and to build up that base,’ said Thomson. ‘But, yeah, we’re in it for the long term.’
