Oxbury achieves first full year of profitability just three years since launch
Oxbury, Britain’s first and only fintech 100% dedicated to farming, with a full UK banking licence and powerful agtech proposition supporting agriculture’s critical transition to net zero, has reported is financial results for 2023, achieving annual profitability for the first time – with over £3m of pre-tax profit.
Launched in 2021, Oxbury’s mission is to help finance food production and farming and to support the sector’s drive towards a more productive and sustainable rural economy.
Since its launch, Oxbury has rapidly gained traction with farming and food businesses across the UK’s £21bn agriculture finance market, leveraging its unique combination of experience across finance, agriculture and technology.
Achieving profitability in less than three years since opening for lending makes it one of the UK’s fast ever fintechs to reach full annual profitability.
Fast becoming the first choice for the UK’s £21bn agriculture finance market
At a time when the UK’s large banks continue to retreat from the sector, Oxbury continued to accelerate its efforts to offer better and flexible finance to the UK’s 200,000 farm businesses:
- Total facilities in place exceeded £686m – a 3% share of the £21bn market.
- Newly launched Asset Finance gained traction, growing to c.£70m (total balances FY23).
- Deposit growth to over £1.06bn – doubling both the amount of savings and number of customers saving with Oxbury since last year.
- Recognised as Lending Tech of the year at the prestigious UK Fintech Awards, and Savings Champion’s Best Savings Provider for Existing Customers.
- Celebrated first anniversary of industry-leading New Gen initiative for young farmers, providing up to 100% funding and business consultancy for new entrant farmers aged between 18 and 40 years. So far, New Gen has helped establish and grow 50 new farms lending them the funds key to their ambitions.
Strong financial performance delivered across 2023
2023 saw significant growth and a strong financial performance for Oxbury:
- Pre-tax profit of over £3m – its first full year of profitability, just three years since launch.
- Substantial growth driven by robust customer demand:
- Total drawn lending grew by 74% to £606m (FY22: £349m)
- Customer deposits increased 240% to £1.06bn (FY22: £441m)
- Doubling of borrowing customers, close to 3,000
- Net interest income increased 341% to £19.4m (FY22: £5.7m), reflecting the growth in lending.
- Credit quality remained high with credit costs representing less than 0.1% of Oxbury’s total lending and reflecting historically lower default risk associated with agriculture.
Long runway for continued, sustained growth – including future international strategy
Oxbury is fast approaching £1bn in total lending, a milestone set to be reached in the coming months, and which would represent a 5% share of the stock of loans to the agriculture finance market.
- Oxbury Earth – the firm’s proprietary agtech platform – has enabled Oxbury to establish an embedded finance proposition with customers, by integrating Oxbury’s farm credit product into clients’ and agriculture distributors systems.
- Oxbury is additionally developing its international strategy, including opportunities to deploy the Oxbury model into other agriculture markets, such as the US with a number of companies interested in partnering with Oxbury to roll out our sector focussed technology overseas.
Successfully raised £24m of new equity from new and existing investors
Oxbury raised £24m of new equity capital in 2023 from new and existing investors in a highly competitive funding market. At the end of 2023, the firm’s total capital raised to date was over a £100m, having delivered a full-service banking and agtech proposition, with capacity to drive additional balance sheet growth and further expansion.
- Oxbury’s capital management strategy has also benefited from the support of the British Business Bank (“BBB”), having undertaken a £100m ENABLE Guarantee transaction with the BBB in November 2023 (since extended to £200m) – the first transaction of its kind to be pre-seeded and which supported over £140m of finance for around 170 businesses in the rural economy within the first six months of completion, underlining the pace and scale at which Oxbury is able to deploy funding into the market for customers.
Commenting on Oxbury’s results, James Farrar, chief executive Officer, said: “2023 was an incredible year for Oxbury. We’ve doubled our customer numbers, more than doubled deposits and grown our lending by 75%.
“There is great demand in agriculture for Oxbury’s offer – customer focused, tech-driven financing, with better products, supported by an experienced team of relationship managers, that can help farmers take on the current challenges they face, including productivity, land changes and the transition to net zero.
“We’re incredibly proud of Oxbury’s progress in such a short space of time. We’ve delivered a growing, profitable business in only three years and built on our very own Oxbury Earth Tech platform – proving how Oxbury can become a new positive force in agriculture, not just in the UK, but potentially overseas.
“As Britain’s first and only agricultural focused fintech, we remain committed to serving food and farming businesses and helping our customers achieve their goals.”