The Royal Bank of Scotland’s first female chief executive is today launching a £1billion fund to support women entrepreneurs.
Alison Rose has set a target for the bank, which was bailed out with more than £45billion of taxpayers’ money in the financial crisis, to help create 50,000 businesses in the next three years.
The fund has been set aside to offer loans for qualifying female-led firms.
Before taking the top job at the bank, Rose conducted a government-backed review which found women business owners were starved of funding compared with their male equivalents. Women typically launch their firms with around only half as much capital as men.
Less than 1 per cent of all venture capital funding goes to female business owners.
Only one in three entrepreneurs in the UK is female, which Rose says equates to a million ‘missing businesses’ if there were parity between the sexes.
‘It doesn’t matter what gender an entrepreneur is,’ she said.
‘But if there are barriers in the way, we should do something about it.
‘My research showed there were specific barriers facing women. One of the key ones was lack of access to and awareness about funding.
‘There is no lack of ambition among women. I have met lots of amazing female entrepreneurs and it is the opposite.’
She said earmarking £1billion for women was ‘absolutely not’ depriving male entrepreneurs of funds.
‘It’s not either/or. We are the largest lender to entrepreneurs in the UK. I am not taking anything away from anyone,’ she said, adding she hopes other banks follow suit.
In the UK only 6 per cent of women run their own business compared with 15 per cent in Canada, 11 per cent in the US and 9 per cent in the Netherlands.
Rose, 50, a mother of two, is the first woman to lead RBS since it was founded in 1727 and the first to run one of the Big Four High Street banks.
One of her toughest tasks in her new job is to repair relationships with the bank’s small and medium business customers, many of whom claim the lender drove them to the wall.
Its Global Restructuring Group (GRG), which was supposed to help nurse troubled firms back to health, was found to have mistreated thousands of its own customers.
Article Credit: thisismoney.co.uk