Dave Fishwick

David Fishwick (born March 1971) is an English businessman. Born in Nelson, Lancashire, he left school at sixteen with no qualifications, before opening David Fishwick Minibus Sales and becoming the biggest minibus supplier in Britain. After finding that big banks were no longer willing to lend his customers money due to the 2008 financial crisis, he opened Burnley Savings and Loans, which used the advertising slogan "Bank on Dave". His efforts were documented in the 2012–2013 Channel 4 series Bank of Dave.

After finding that customers were coming to him after accumulating debt using payday loan firms, he investigated the industry for the 2014 Channel 4 series Dave: Loan Ranger. Both of these series won British Academy Scotland Awards. His efforts at setting up a bank and investigating payday loan firms were loosely adapted for the 2023 film Bank of Dave and its 2025 sequel Bank of Dave 2: The Loan Ranger.

Fishwick was born in March 1971. He grew up in a poor family on John Street in Nelson, Lancashire, and attended Edge End High School, both of which were later demolished. He left school aged sixteen with no qualifications, and took a Youth Training Scheme course at a construction site for £27.50 per week (equivalent to £93 in 2023) plus overtime, where he pebbledashed buildings. While there, he was motivated by an incident in which he discovered after ordering a chip butty that he was threepence short, prompting the cashier to bin a handful of already salted and vinegared chips.

"I went around all the garages and I found one that had some old part exchanges and I said, "Could I take that old part exchange away? I'll clean it up. I'll scrub it off. I'll sell it. I'll advertise it and I'll bring you back an agreed amount of money, and the difference is mine." I eventually found a garage that agreed, and I agreed to give them £70 for this [Vauxhall] Cavalier when I sold it. I took it away, scrubbed it up, sold it for £97 so I made £27 profit. I repeated that process to the point where I could negotiate a better deal and could pay upfront, and that's how it started."

After choosing to enter the UK automotive industry, he asked several garages if he could have a part-exchanged car to restore and sell in exchange for some of the profits. His first part-exchange was a heavily scratched Vauxhall Cavalier with flat tyres, which he bought for £70, advertised in the local paper for £100 and sold for £97. He repeated this process until he could afford to buy upfront, and would stuff his wallet with paper to make himself appear richer to prospective sellers. Around this time, he spent his mornings selling cheap clothes for a profit and his evenings performing as a disc jockey. He met his future wife while working at a nightclub after she told him the music he was playing was rubbish, prompting him to invite her to pick a record so long as she wrote her phone number on its sleeve.

Fishwick then diversified into refurbishing vans after being given a red Astramax van to refurbish, and then into minibuses for the same reason. He switched exclusively to vans, minibuses, and minicoaches in 1994, and opened David Fishwick Minibus Sales, which had sites in Colne, Birmingham, and Stockport. He later became the biggest minibus supplier in Britain.

Between 2004 and 2017, the firm sponsored Burnley F.C., during which time the club's Turf Moor stadium's Cricket Field Stand was named the David Fishwick Stand. In 2005, having bought a helicopter for his own use and finding that others were asking if they could borrow it, Fishwick opened a helicopter business, David Fishwick Helicopters Ltd, which provided charter flights.

During the 2008 financial crisis, Fishwick found that big banks had stopped lending his customers money, posing an existential threat to his business. After lending his own money on his own terms, and after no borrowers defaulted on their payments during the first six months, he looked into setting up a bank himself, where he discovered that although obtaining a consumer credit licence was simple enough, obtaining a deposit-taking licence required a minimum of £10,000,000 to be kept in reserve under Financial Conduct Authority regulations. He later opened Burnley Savings and Loans in September 2011 in Keirby Walk in the town centre using a peer-to-peer crowdfunding model, with "Bank on Dave" emblazoned on the front of the shop as an advertising slogan.