BNP Paribas Personal Finance UK and SuperTech WM: a flourishing partnership, firmly rooted in the Midlands, centred on tech-innovation led growth
As a leading consumer finance provider in the UK, BNP Paribas Personal Finance UK supports over four million customers, welcoming a new customer every 22 seconds and has a rich partnership ecosystem, including leading household names, covering retail finance, personal loans and motor finance.
Based in the West Midlands for over fifty years, BNP Paribas Personal Finance UK officially opened its new headquarters in Solihull in early 2025 as a clear statement of commitment to the region for the coming decades. The decision to remain in the West Midlands was based on strategic forecasting and the company’s ambitious growth plans, per Stephen Hunt, Chief Executive Officer at BNP Paribas Personal Finance UK, “As the region with the fastest-growing tech sector in the UK, there is no better place for our team to be based to drive forward our business than the West Midlands.”
BNP Paribas Personal Finance UK is at the forefront of digital transformation in the financial services sector and as a result, is an active contributor to programmes aimed to supercharge the industry. This includes being a founding participant of the FinTech incubator programme, The Innovation Lab, in collaboration with SuperTech WM and STEAMhouse. But its journey with SuperTech didn’t start or stop there. We spoke with Jayne Licari, Head of Communications at BNP Paribas Personal Finance UK to find out more about the ongoing focus on technology-led innovation and our strategic partnership.
How did the relationship with SuperTech evolve?
SuperTech as a catalyst for internal change
SuperTech delivers programmes that truly support a business in driving forward innovation, across all size and shape companies, including large financial services organisations, like ours. Hilary, SuperTech’s CEO, along with other experts in the team, deliver against their sound strategy to generate positive macro impacts through micro-level interventions, supporting the creation of a dynamic innovation ecosystem.
SuperTech Innovation Services
What we enjoy about our relationship with SuperTech is the openness, the trust and how we have used that to evolve our programmes. Right from the start of the partnership, working with SuperTech and running collaborative workshops for our senior leaders to support how technology-led innovation can change our business, really focused our strategy on technology as a platform for growth. The process helped challenge us to think differently, asking ourselves how we can become more agile and move even more quickly to bring our products to market.
Our next step in partnership was the development and launch of The Innovation Lab accelerator programme, bringing in STEAMhouse – another SuperTech recommendation - as a delivery partner for the programme.
The Innovation Lab
In our rapidly evolving FinTech landscape, not all innovation starts from traditional FinTech businesses or applications. Acknowledging this, we launched the Innovation Lab, an incubator programme dedicated to discovering digital solutions from tech start-ups from a range of sectors to respond to data-led challenges within the financial services industry. Successful applicants get many benefits, including the opportunity to collaborate with BNP Paribas Personal Finance in a culture of open innovation and co-creation.
The Innovation Lab has the full backing of our senior leadership team:
“For us to remain a leader in personal finance, it’s important we open our minds and embrace new ideas to help us deliver better products, services and solutions for our customers and partners which is what this partnership is all about. I enjoy working with digital tech companies to explore various ways we can address data-led challenges in the financial services sector.”
The programme has been very successful. One of the first participants in 2024’s Innovation Lab programme, Inicio AI has certainly enjoyed exciting growth – closing a successful round of funding which included the Tech WM One to Win, with £1 million in funding, including investment from the WMCA .
“From day one of engaging with everyone within SuperTech, they have supported Inicio by delivering the right programmes, at the right time, in the right way. Their founder-first approach met our evolving needs at every stage, turning early ambition into sustainable growth. For example, the Innovation Lab accelerator in partnership with BNP Paribas Personal Finance and STEAMhouse provided the opportunity to live-test our proposition back in 2024, and that early product validation was essential in our next steps as a business.”
Opportunities for sharing and best practice
SuperTech excels at providing opportunities for us to share as well as learn from best practice and our recent involvement in the Consumer Duty Financial Regulation Innovation Challenge, led by FinTech Scotland in partnership with SuperTech, really confirmed this to us. Not only were we able to engage with innovative tech companies, but our learnings from our involvement in a different innovation challenge programme will benefit our next iteration of our own Innovation Lab.
As a supercluster organisation, SuperTech has also taken the learnings and best practice from the Innovation Lab and from the FRIL Innovation Challenges with FinTech Scotland to launch the UK’s first LawTech Innovation Challenge. This has started a process that has become a real catalyst for broader change.
Through our combined leadership, SuperTech and BNP Paribas Personal Finance continue to evaluate and evolve the Innovation Lab programme and are currently running our third Innovation programme together with STEAMhouse, focused on the use of technology to improve the customer experience.
Our joint event during Birmingham Tech Week was an open event for us to share best practice and learnings with other financial services providers and organisations from other sectors about how to effectively run innovation programmes and why they are such a powerful tool across many strategic areas.
Reconfirming our commitment to the region
Working with SuperTech across all the programmes and being part of its well-supported ecosystem, is a win, win, not just for us in how we can explore innovation, not just to see the benefits for the FinTechs taking part, but also with the impact its work is having on the region economically.
Each success, the fantastic stories of the Founders, both as individuals and of their companies, also build into the bigger fabric of macro-economic success for Birmingham and the West Midlands. We are open in sharing how we do things, at Birmingham Tech Week we held an open forum to share our learnings to support any other organisations within financial services and in other sectors who want to set up their own innovation programmes.
The value of SuperTech as a trusted partner is huge, bringing connections that have previously been hidden, like pipework under a city, up to shine a light on them, develop and nurture them, and create a cross-sector web of innovation for the region.
“The partnership between SuperTech and BNP Paribas Personal Finance UK is a great example of how collaboration between global financial institutions and local innovation ecosystems can drive inclusive growth. By combining SuperTech’s expertise in technology-driven transformation with BNP Paribas Personal Finance’s commitment to responsible lending and customer-focused innovation, this partnership strengthens the West Midlands’ position as a hub for next-generation financial services. It’s a powerful demonstration of how the region’s collaborative approach can attract investment, create skilled jobs, and deliver real benefits for communities across the West Midlands.”
What next?
We would like to build out a proposition that strengthens our engagement with education and our local universities. We want to continue to challenge ourselves, our mindsets, stay ambitious and continue to build on the momentum we have, both internally and externally as more people within our organisation see our work as such a great catalyst for positive change.