A breakfast conversation with Joel Perlman, Co-Founder, OakNorth

Fireside chat: Scaling through complexity

OakNorth was built on the foundations of frustration. When our founders tried to get business finance for their data analytics company, the computer said no. The industry was too focused on financials from the past rather than potential in the future. So they built the bank they wished had existed: founded by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs.

Since launch in September 2015, OakNorth has since lent over $21bn to proven entrepreneur-led businesses in the lower-mid-market, who are too often overlooked by traditional banks. In this session, Joel Perlman, co-founder & Senior Managing Director of OakNorth, shares what he has learned from both sides of the table: what the best-run scaling businesses get right, where they break, and what AI is genuinely changing in financial decision-making, beyond the hype.

This will be a fireside conversation with Joel, covering:

• The mid-market banking gap and why it still exists despite a decade of fintech disruption
• What AI actually does inside a regulated institution, and what that means for businesses like yours
• The cultural and operational realities of building at scale — what worked, what didn’t
• Followed by open discussion and Q&A with the group.

The format

• 9am – 9.30am: Welcome and breakfast
• 9.30am -10.15am: Fireside chat and Q&A
• 10.15am -10.30am: Coffee and networking

Who this is for

This conversation is for founders and CEOs who have already proven product-market fit and are now in the harder, higher-stakes chapter: scaling without losing control.

If you are leading a UK business above £2m turnover and starting to feel the complexity curve, multiple entities, bigger payrolls, tighter cash cycles, more scrutiny, more moving parts, this is designed for you. Especially if you are building the kind of financial and operational infrastructure that will still hold at £20m+, not the version that worked at £5m but will not hold at £20m.

It’s a closed-door breakfast for ambitious, entrepreneur-led companies that are scaling fast and thinking long term, the leaders who want sharper perspective, better decisions, and access to peers who are facing the same challenges.