Why we partnered with Firenze
By Jay Wilson, Partner AlbionVC
Posted
David Newman has spent fifteen years inside the machinery of private banking and wealth infrastructure. Barclays. UBS. Then Delio. He has watched, from the inside, the same problem refuse to solve itself: Lombard lending – one of private banking’s most powerful tools – has remained gated behind the walls of the largest institutions, out of reach of the investors who could most benefit from it.
Firenze started by democratising Lombard lending. It is now building the credit infrastructure that will reshape how wealth and liquidity needs interact seamlessly.
Lombard lending – borrowing against a diversified investment portfolio rather than selling it – has always been one of the most elegant credit products in wealth management. Secured. Flexible. Tax-efficient. Useful in the moments that matter: tax bills, capital calls, bridging, overseas property, liquidity events where selling long-term assets is the wrong answer.
It has also been gated. Slow. Manual. Private-bank-only. Closed to anyone except UHNWs. A product for the few, with frictions that prevent it for the many.
Private banks are vacating a £1tn+ segment of UK wealth. Hundreds of non-bank wealth managers want to fill it. None of them can build embedded credit capabilities. The institutional capacity that once sat behind Lombard lending is disappearing, leaving the wealth that sits in the mass-affluent and HNW segments with no workable Lombard option.
The gap is structural. The consistent message from the industry: this is a friction problem, not a demand problem.
The segment nobody else serves
Investor customers and wealth managers alike are now chronically underserved. Leading non-bank wealth managers consistently told us they had been “kicked off more than one private bank where they pulled out of the market,” and had “spent five to ten years cycling through four or five providers.”
For clients with £250k to £2m invested – the fastest-growing slice of UK wealth – and the wealth managers that serve them, no viable product exists. These firms are leaning into Firenze, many seeking out new FCA permissions to integrate with the platform. That is the clearest product-market-pull signal.
The use cases stretch well beyond the private-banking archetype. Firenze is already supporting inheritance and tax planning, intergenerational wealth transfer, alternatives to traditional property bridging – even what David describes as “reinventing the bank of mum and dad,” helping parents support children through university, a first step onto the property ladder, or a wedding. In uncertain markets, clients want liquidity without disrupting carefully planned portfolios. Firenze delivers it, often in as little as twenty-four hours.
The category is being rebuilt in real time
Firenze is the infrastructure layer for collateralised credit.
The wedge today is a narrow expression of what that infrastructure can power – and it is deliberate: Lombard lending for UK wealth. A B2B platform that lets wealth managers, advisor platforms and DFMs offer digital Lombard lending to their clients – without moving custody, without building a credit team, without taking balance-sheet risk.
What looks simple on the surface is, underneath, three structurally hard problems solved in a single platform: capital, compliance, and custody.
David has earned the right to build it. Deep domain expertise. A wide network. A history of reshaping industry processes and single-handedly commercialising innovation inside complex regulated markets. We are delighted to partner with David, a founder CEO with the ambition and craft to deliver a category-defining outcome.
The flywheel is turning
Traction through Q1 2026 is running ahead of even the most ambitious targets. We met David over a year ago, when these numbers were only an idea. Today, signed partners cover almost £200bn in AUM – including top-20 wealth managers Brooks Macdonald and Canaccord, independent private offices Artorius, Lincoln and Cerno, and investment platforms Parmenion, P1 and Soderberg. Drawn facility volumes tripled in Q1 alone. The private banks that once owned this product are now approaching Firenze to streamline, de-risk and optimise their own Lombard activity.
The SaaS layer creates the data connection into underlying portfolios. That data feed makes digital lending possible. The lending generates revenue, deepens the relationship, and makes the integration structurally sticky. The risk engine gets richer with every loan.
But the moat is not the loan. The moat is the stack sitting underneath it. Firenze has a level of durability hard to find today – reworking its capability would mean re-papering, re-integrating, and re-approving across every regulated counterparty in the value chain.
The partnership
Firenze sits inside our rebundling thesis – the view that the economics of financial services are being reassembled around embedded, specialist infrastructure providers that sit between incumbents and end customers. Technology maturity and regulatory tailwinds mean this category can be built right now, and David has the fluency and the relationships to build this rail.
Distribution is already running ahead of plan. The compliance-heavy infrastructure wedge compounds a moat every day through data, risk models, CCA permissions and multi-party integrations. The investor support for this round respects the incredible execution to date and funds the next chapter: doubling the team, extending the SaaS proposition for banks including an agentic credit structurer, and launching into new jurisdictions.
Firenze has gone from democratising Lombard lending to building credit infrastructure that will reshape how wealth and liquidity needs interact seamlessly.
That is the partnership we are proud to back.
Firenze has gone from democratising Lombard lending to building credit infrastructure that will reshape how wealth and liquidity needs interact seamlessly.
Jay Wilson, Partner AlbionVC
That is the partnership we are proud to back.
