Dave Fishwick has been awarded an OBE in the King's Birthday Honours list for services to finance, business and charity, a formal recognition for the Burnley entrepreneur whose name became familiar far beyond Lancashire. Fishwick said it was wonderful that His Majesty the King had taken time to look at what he had been doing and had seen fit to award him the honour.
The award lands at a point when Fishwick is already a public face for a very specific idea: that finance can be built around local lending and then channelled back into good causes. He founded Burnley Saving and Loans in 2011, after making his fortune supplying minibuses and opening an independent lending company after the 2008 financial crash.
The timing matters because Fishwick’s story has already moved from the high street to the screen. The work behind Burnley Saving and Loans, and his investigations into loan sharks, was adapted for 2023's Bank of Dave, with Rory Kinnear playing him, and Bank of Dave 2: The Loan Ranger followed in 2025. His new OBE adds an official seal to a reputation that was built long before the films arrived.
That reputation sits alongside a contradiction Fishwick has never tried to hide. He said he left school at 16 with no qualifications and called himself “absolutely useless” at the time, yet he has spent years being celebrated for finance and business. That gap is part of why the honour resonates: it rewards not a polished corporate career, but a route built through persistence, self-belief and a refusal to stop working on the same problem.
Fishwick has also been clear about what he wants next. The profits from Burnley Savings and Loans go to good causes, often in Lancashire, and he said he wants to keep getting his message out about determination and money. He said he had been invited to take part in Strictly Come Dancing, but cannot dance, and has also been offered the jungle and plenty of other things he would not want to do. The dancing, he said, sounded fun and might be a next time project. He is also set to become the ambassador for 6,000 community banks in the US, a sign that the campaign that began in Burnley still has more ground to cover.
