Robert Sharpe brings with him over 45 years’ experience in retail banking and is currently chair at Metro Bank, HTB and Pollen Street.

Andrew has over 25 years’ experience in financial services and joins Alba from Aldermore, where he served three years as CRO.

Prior to that, he was an expert partner at Bain & Co in their financial services and digital practice and previously worked in NatWest Group for over 20 years, where he held several senior business and risk roles.

Alba was granted its banking licence by the UK Prudential Regulatory Authority (PRA) and the FCA earlier this year, allowing it to move into mobilisation and focus on building out its team, operations and infrastructure.

Rod Ashley, CEO at Alba Bank, commented: “With the addition of Robert and Andrew to our leadership team, we have reached another crucial milestone in our journey towards launch.

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“[They] bring considerable experience of running successful retail banks — at big institutions and smaller challenger banks — [so] their insight into the challenges and opportunities of creating a bank committed to serving SMEs will be invaluable.”

Robert added: “I’m looking forward to using my experience of building successful challenger banks to helping Alba achieve its vision and strategy.

“The bank is well capitalised and fully focused on building a modern, customer-centric, efficient organisation which can successfully take on the competition.

“I am very excited to be part of this new venture.”

Andrew concluded: “I’ve spent a lot of my career working with the SME sector which has been consistently failed by the big banks.

“There are many reasons for that failure, but we see a real opportunity for Alba to champion this key part of the UK economy as a specialist lender [and] I’m delighted to be part of it.

“As CRO I’ll be focussed on helping mobilise a safe, scalable and sustainable bank, ensuring that we have the full confidence and backing of our key stakeholders, and offering compelling SME lending and online savings propositions to our customers.”