The Cosmic Watchdog

Playing a burly American thug chasing a lightly fictionalised version of himself has to rank as one of the more surreal experiences of Dave Fishwick’s life to date – but in fairness the big-hearted banker from Burnley has had more than a few.

After leaving school at 16 with no qualifications, he escaped poverty to become a self-made millionaire and entrepreneur, in 2011 opening the first community bank in the UK for 120 years before becoming a champion of better financial regulation.

Two years ago, the streaming giant Netflix made the smash film Bank of Dave about his remarkable David V Goliath rise to prominence. Now, a sequel features his incredible battle to take on the rapacious payday lenders.

And Bank of Dave 2: The Lone Ranger, once again released on Netflix, sees the real-life hero enjoy not one but three separate cameo roles, including as a henchman for malevolent payday lender boss, Carlo Mancini, played by Rob Delaney.

Which explains the aforementioned scene in which he finds himself in the strange situation of chasing his fictional alter-ego, played by Bond star Rory Kinnear.

“It’s weird when you start playing with it in your head: it’s Dave who is not Dave going after Rory who is playing Dave,” laughs the man himself speaking to me over Zoom from Burnley, a place he describes as “the centre of the universe”.

The 53-year-old with a broad Burnley accent – he took voice coaching sessions to nail the American one – has become a well-known face on television in recent years through his campaigns for better financial reform.

But chase aside, how much of Bank of Dave 2: The Loan Ranger is real and how much is imagined? Netflix is, after all, only calling it a “true-ish” story.

“It’s more than trueish. You can get the ‘ish’ off, there’s a big lump of truth in this one,” he shoots back, barely pausing for breath. “I went after Wonga and I helped get them shut down for real. We had people writing to the Bank of Dave saying, ‘We’re in a mess’. ‘We’re in debt’. ‘We’re being charged 6,000% interest APR and we’ve nowhere to turn’.

“I thought, ‘Well we need to shut the big one down and we need to get the law changed.”

The “we” in his statement is his “right-hand man”, another Dave before you ask: David Henshaw, a banker for 60 years played by Piers Quigley in the film.

Until its collapse in 2018, Britain’s biggest payday lender Wonga was the arch-villain of the piece. Established in 2006, it offered short-term loans at high interest rates. At one point these exceeded 5,000% APR, meaning a simple loan of hundreds soon mushroomed to thousands of pounds.

Marketed through TV adverts featuring puppets as hip pensioners, the firm exploited the technological advances on smartphones to attract vulnerable customers who struggled to repay their debts as they skyrocketed.

By 2011, Wonga was making profits of £45.8million on 2.5 million loans and Dave had started receiving letters from desperate folk lured into taking on the lender’s unaffordable payday loans. Moved by the stories, he took responsibility for 25 separate payday loans and told each person they only needed to pay him a few pounds a week until the debt was repaid.

“I told them, ‘If you can’t afford to pay, don’t worry about it. I will now take your debt’. Some of these people burst into tears in front of me. They were in a really bad way, some had run away from home,” he recalls. But he couldn’t take on everyone’s loans, hence his campaign.

Dave made his fortune despite leaving school without qualifications.

After becoming a building labourer aged 16, he began restoring and selling second-hand cars, eventually opening his own garage.

He then made his millions by establishing the country’s largest minibus dealership. But when customers became some of the small businesses struggling to access credit in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, he set up Burney Savings and Loans, known colloquially as the “Bank of Dave”.

In person, he is ebullient and warm, but underneath his cheery exterior, he is clearly as hard as nails. After taking on the debts, he and David Henshaw decided to track down the payday loan lenders responsible for making money from misery.

“It was harder than I thought because just finding these people is an art in itself because they don’t want to be found,” he sighs.

“They don’t want to be paid back because doing that will stop the constant flow of money to them. When you’re paying interest of 5,000%, you can never pay back the debt because you’re constantly just paying the interest and that’s what these companies want.

“I found all these addresses in London and went and pressed on their buzzers. They were cupboards above a fast food restaurant or a small office around the back of somewhere nobody uses. They were PO Boxes. And they all led back to America – or they used to but they got shut down there so they started coming to Britain.”

In the film, US investigative reporter Jessica, played by Chrissy Metz, and Citizens Advice Bureau counsellor Oliver (Happy Valley’s Amit Shah) help Rory (as Dave) take on the money lenders located in the US. Even given its serious nature, it’s a hoot.

But did the real-life Dave end up in similar violent encounters to the ones portrayed on screen? “I ended up rolling around on the floor with one company because they tried to throw me out,” he admits. “They were terrible, terrible people and they were inflicting violence on us. But I’m frightened of nothing and no one on the planet – I knew we were doing the right thing.

He adds: “I’m a very, very good boxer. I haven’t got a problem sticking up for the vulnerable because these people are the scum of the earth.”

At one stage, Dave met a middleman acting on behalf of various payday loan companies who elicited little sympathy about the desperate cases Dave highlighted.

“I told him, ‘We’ve had instances where people have set themselves on fire because they’re in so much debt.’ He tried hard to defend the companies but I said, ‘It’s indefensible, it’s wrong.’ He told me it was going to carry on forever.’”

But encountering such dubious characters led him down a dark path.

“They tried to come after me, they came to my house, they contacted people who worked for me, they were doing all sorts of dirty tricks,” he says.

He won’t say who “they” are, but stresses that filming “protected” him.

“After making the original Bank of Dave, all these big banks came after me,” he says. “I try to do the right thing but the big banks hate me with a passion and still do because we give the best rate of interest on the high street.

“We lend to people who can’t borrow from high street banks and, after the overheads are paid, we feed 350 children every morning.”

Through his extensive campaigning and media work, Dave played a huge part in putting Wonga and other high-interest lenders out of business.

In June 2014, the Financial Conduct Authority set an agreement with Wonga for it to repay compensation of over £2.6million to approximately 45,000 customers over “unfair and misleading debt collection practices”.

The next year, the City regulator introduced sweeping regulation across the payday lending industry – setting a price cap that slashed interest rates and prevented a person’s debt from rising above double its original amount while demanding stricter borrowing criteria.

The profits of these predatory companies soon collapsed.

But Dave continues to advocate for the disadvantaged and vulnerable. Other buy-now, pay-later providers have filled the gap left by the likes of Wonga and, sadly, loan sharks have proliferated during the recent cost-of-living crisis.

Dave believes the withdrawal of bank branches from our high streets has helped to fuel the problem.

“We’ve got 54 bank branches closing a month, 115 Post Offices are shutting and you’ve got a situation where 15,000 free-to-use cash machines have gone so there is no access to money any more,” he says. “The rise of loan sharks is because of the banks closing.”

He hears of desperate situations all the time.

“I had one mum call me up for a loan for baby formula. Baby milk – that’s just bonkers,” he says. “We just sent her the money.”

The Government’s Illegal Money Lending Team (ILMT) is part of the fight back, working to find and prosecute loan sharks. Dave works closely with them, accompanying them on house raids and working with journalists to highlight the personal injustices.

“It starts off with someone meeting someone in a pub or a village when they need money,” he tells me. “They’re lent a few hundred pounds but, weeks later, the interest has rocketed and that’s how it starts. But it’s going to get worse and worse. I feel that the rise of payday loans and loan sharks mean things are worse now than when I started 10 years ago.

The IMLT has made 424 prosecutions over the last 20 years and helped 32,000 people escape their debts. But many vulnerable people are suffering in silence, too afraid to speak to loved ones about their situation.

Worryingly, figures show some 42% of people have gone without food, fuel, or covering their rent or mortgage to repay a loan. Dave is now campaigning to keep as many Post Offices open as possible. He also wants a clampdown on companies who bypass affordability checks in applications. Closer to Burnley, the Bank of Dave has so far loaned more than £40million to people, regularly donating money from its profits to charities and community projects. “I have all the money I need,” Dave shrugs.

He also tells me he has been offered “life-changing” money to sell the Bank of Dave but sees himself as a custodian.

“I’ve got children and grandchildren and I’m just holding the Bank of Dave for them so it’ll go on and on. It will never ever be sold. It will always be there doing what it does,” he says.

There is much to enjoy in the new film. Rock band Def Leppard return after making a cameo in the first film after learning about Dave and his benevolence.

It’s fun and boisterous – much like Burnley’s main man himself. But it has a serious message at its heart.

“Everybody needs lifting up at this time of year,” Dave explains. “I’d love people to have fun and be entertained. Laugh, smile and cry along with us. But at the end, I would like people to take away that if they know somebody who is in trouble with debt or with a payday loan, we’re here for them.”

Bank of Dave 2: The Loan Ranger is out on Netflix now