Firenze raises £6m to sell its Lombard lending engine to banks

On 21 April, Manchester-based Firenze announced a £6m funding round led by AlbionVC, with follow-on money from existing investors including Outward VC and Form Ventures. The company builds the software and lending arrangements that let wealth managers, advisers and investment platforms offer their clients Lombard loans. It closed a £2.5m seed round, led by Outward, 12 months earlier. Albion partner Jay Wilson was appointed a director of Firenze on 3 April, according to Companies House.

A Lombard loan is a credit line secured against a portfolio of investments, so the borrower raises cash without selling holdings. Private banks have offered it for years, and Firenze’s own site has said such loans are “typically only available to clients with £1m +”. In March 2025, Outward described Firenze’s version as loans of £65,000 to £5m for qualifying clients of its partner firms, with decisions within 24 hours, funds within 72 hours and the loan issued “cross-custody”: the portfolio stays wherever it is held rather than moving to the lender.

David Newman, Firenze’s founder and chief executive, incorporated Firenze Group Ltd in May 2023. According to the company, he worked as a private banker at Barclays and UBS, and he later built Delio, which he calls his former venture. In an interview Outward published in April 2025, he said he had never heard of Lombard lending before joining Barclays, and that in Europe investors without more than £1m in net asset value can’t borrow against their assets the way the wealthiest do.

Alongside more wealth manager partners and launches in new jurisdictions, the company said the money will “further enhance our SaaS offering for banks”, including the rollout of what it calls an agentic credit structurer. A company founded to take Lombard lending beyond the private banks now plans to sell its tooling to those banks as well, and the round funds both businesses at once.

Wealth managers keep the client and the assets

Firenze does not take custody of client portfolios. Its site says it enters into the credit agreements itself, and Outward said in March 2025 that it funds the loans with third-party capital, starting with a £160m facility from Monument Bank. Partner firms offer the loans under their own brand. The company’s case to them is retention: its site argued that non-bank wealth managers had to move a client’s assets to a private bank to arrange a Lombard loan, losing custody revenue and assets under management, or watch the client sell investments to raise cash.

Brooks Macdonald, which had £19.7bn of assets under management at the time, signed with Firenze in December 2025. Its chief executive, Andrea Montague, said at the time that Lombard lending “provides clients with the ability to access liquidity while staying invested”. Firenze said on 21 April that its partners represent almost £200bn in assets under management, among them Brooks Macdonald and Canaccord Wealth, the private offices Artorius, Lincoln and Cerno, and the platforms Parmenion, P1 and Soderberg. At the seed round in March 2025, the company put the figure at about £75bn.

That figure is the partners’ total assets, not money lent. The company said the total volume of drawn facilities tripled during the first quarter of 2026 but did not give the amount, and it has not published the size of its loan book. Andi Kazeroonian, principal at Outward VC, said the partner network had grown five-fold in the 12 months since the seed round.

The banks as customers

Firenze’s release says the bank business grew out of the first one. “While private banks have offered access to Lombard facilities for years, the sophistication of our technology and monitoring is now attracting interest from those very same providers,” Firenze said. It said those banks see a way to streamline and de-risk their own Lombard lending, and to lend safely against assets they don’t hold in custody. Kazeroonian described “a SaaS proposition that’s attracting leading banks and financial institutions”. Neither named one.

Outward’s 2025 investment note explained the cost problem the software addresses. It said traditional loan management systems do not track the value and make-up of pledged portfolios, so lenders do the work by hand and set high minimum loans, for example £1m or more. Software that automates that monitoring is useful to whoever runs the loans, whether a wealth manager reselling Firenze’s loans or a bank with its own book. Wilson said Firenze delivers “a platform that solves the custody, capital, and compliance challenges simultaneously”, and called it “the foundational infrastructure layer to power the next generation of collateralized credit products”.

A board built for the next stage

Firenze put a board with banking experience in place before this round. By March 2025 the company had named Paul Pester as chair, listing his background as Virgin Money, Tandem Bank and TSB. He has been a director since September 2024, as have Samantha Bamert and Mike Toole, according to Companies House. The company plans to more than double its headcount to handle borrower requests and new partners. “The market demand for Firenze’s solution has exceeded our expectations and as a result our vision has got more and more ambitious,” Newman said.

At the seed round, Firenze set itself a goal of £3bn of Lombard lending within three years. The £6m also pays for a second line of business, software for banks, which has no named customer yet. If the bank software sells, Firenze moves from a product wealth managers use to compete with private banks to infrastructure the private banks run too, and its promise to wealth managers – that they no longer need a private bank to offer the loan – will have to sit alongside contracts with private banks themselves.