The £1.2 billion innovation district, located in Oxford, received the title as part of CoStar’s 2025 Impact Awards, which recognise transformative achievements in commercial real estate.

Simon Ruck, managing director of Oxford North, said: “We are truly honoured to receive this significant recognition from CoStar.

“The Impact Awards shine a spotlight on the projects making a genuine and lasting contribution to the commercial real estate market, and to be named the most impactful development in the South East is a proud moment for everyone involved in Oxford North.

“We look forward to continuing to raise the bar as we progress the next phases and welcome more occupiers to what we believe will become one of the world’s most important innovation districts.”

Oxford North is being developed by Oxford North Ventures, a joint venture between Thomas White Oxford, the development company of St John’s College; Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan; and Stanhope.

The site is designed to support the full spectrum of the science, technology, and innovation ecosystem, from start-ups to established global firms.

It is expected to contribute £150 million per year to the economy in gross value added (GVA).

To date, it has supported more than 2,123 construction jobs, with 29 per cent filled by Oxfordshire residents.

Spanning 64 acres, Oxford North includes purpose-built laboratory and office space, 480 new homes, a hotel, nursery, and three public parks.

For businesses of all shapes and sizes, regular IT refreshes are essential to avoid outdated equipment impeding productivity, frustrating users, heightening security risks, and leading to unplanned downtime. 

With that said, refreshes aren’t always appealing or financially feasible for firms in the current economic climate. That’s not because firms don’t see the benefits of modernising devices, but because the upfront costs are simply too prohibitively expensive.

Traditionally, acquiring new devices has required businesses to commit to large capital outlays that, in recent times, have become even more eyewatering than usual. Largely driven by AI, demand for key computing components has risen and inventory shortages have emerged, driving up prices. Gartner has forecast a 130% surge in the cost DRAM and SSDs by the end of 2026, which will increase PC prices by 17% versus 2025, for example.

Consequently, many companies are delaying their refreshes and sweating their devices for longer due to a widening gap between what businesses know they need and what they feel they can realistically afford. 

For the channel, however, it’s also a problem. When customers are hesitant to refresh or upgrade their devices, channel partners in turn lose sales opportunities. 

The benefits of DaaS for channel partners and their customers

Here, DeviceasaService (DaaS) finance models can provide a solution to these challenges for channel partners and their customers alike. 

By giving businesses the ability to obtain devices on a financing basis, with simple monthly payments, DaaS can directly address those headaches for firms that cannot justify or afford large upfront expenses on tens or hundreds of devices.

Consider the impact: a single laptop refresh for a team of 10 might cost £6,500. For a small business, that is a significant investment. However, when those same devices can be leased from £17 per month per device, the finances no longer feel so prohibitive. 

It’s also worth noting that in DaaS models, customers will often pay less than a device’s overall capital value due to the anticipated residual value that those lending the devices will retain when they’re returned. As a result, customers’ upfront costs are reduced, their total cost of usage is lowered, and budgeting becomes more predictable, enabling firms to easily scale up or down their devices in line with their needs. 

For the channel, there are likewise several benefits. Indeed, financing payments in combination with the residual value of the devices can actually be more profitable than selling devices alone. Meanwhile, with many devices  leased for fixed terms, channel partners can benefit from predictable refresh cycles. 

In many cases, customers won’t buy all their devices at once. One year they might acquire 20. Six months later, they may need 20 more. As a result, channel partners can find themselves in a position where they have regular, predictable touchpoints with customers that can help to enhance regular customer interaction, with more touchpoints providing the opportunity to nurture relationships and improve customer loyalty.

Further, in my experience, customers typically tend to acquire more services and solutions when moving to DaaS models. This can include device enrolment, warranty extensions and support bundles that are far more margin-rich than the hardware itself. 

Why the channel hasn’t yet solved the financing challenge

While there are clear benefits for both channel partners and their customers, IT financing adoption remains relatively low in B2B spheres, with penetration sitting around 5%. Versus sectors like automotive, where financing or leasing can regularly be the default approach, this is comparatively extremely low. 

Often, the reason for this is that financing in IT is rarely positioned proactively. Indeed, many resellers will only explore it when a customer specifically asks for such a solution.

There’s a good reason for that. Indeed, traditional finance workflows are manual and painfully slow . Getting finance quotes can take hours, involving many emails, forms and constant back-and-forth.. As a result, there is little incentive for channel partners to proactively go out and seek financing quotes that customers may not even want to use.

To solve this challenge, channel partners should look to leverage fully digital, API-driven DaaS financing platforms. Critically, these can generate accurate, customisable DaaS quotes in under 30 seconds, which can then be delivered directly to the customer’s inbox.

With these tools, financing becomes a natural part of the sales process without the administrative burdens that usually come with it, replacing complex, hour-long workflows with financing options that we’re used to seeing in consumer spheres.

Democratising the market

Traditionally, DaaS hasn’t been made readily available for smaller customers. 

That makes little sense. Indeed, those smaller, more cost-conscious companies that are impacted the most by significant capital outlays have been most underserved in terms of device financing. Many of these firms would like the option to refresh on finance, but lack the ability to do so.

With the right tools, channel partners can help bridge this gap for their customers. The topi platform, for example, can enable channel firms to offer leased /financed based hardware solutions to any customer, whether they need two devices or 500, through the same seamless digital process.

For customers, it can feel instantly familiar. The model works much like car leasing – you get access to the equipment you need, pay a predictable monthly amount, use it for a term, and then return or upgrade it at the end.

The B2B market has been slow to follow in these convenient, digitised footsteps for years, until now. With API-driven integrations, modern DaaS tools can allow resellers to provide monthly pricing options directly on their website and allow customers to check out on a DaaS contract automatically.

A model that is gaining momentum

DaaS isn’t new, but it’s a space that’s evolving. With many large organisations already financing much of their IT through DaaS, there’s a real opportunity for channel partners to now bring similar solutions to the mid-market and SME space, catering to those firms that will benefit most from financing solutions.

It’s not a case of flipping sales processes on their head, but of making financing more flexible and efficient for customers to drive market growth. 

Channel partners and customers, expect fast quotes, predictable and constant pricing and a consumer-grade digital experience. topi delivers in these areas, getting fast quotes to customers to drive more conversions, greater customer loyalty, and predictable refresh cycles that provide the foundations for long‑term, scalable growth.

GoCardless and Jellyfish Energy have completed the first recurring Pay by Bank transaction in a live test with banks.

The transaction moves beyond the sweeping use of open banking payments introduced in 2022 by applying the model to commercial payments. It was processed on behalf of Jellyfish Energy, a UK business energy supplier that plans to offer the method to its business customers.

Recurring Pay by Bank lets customers approve ongoing bank-to-bank payments through open banking rather than card networks. In the UK, supporters say it could lower merchants’ transaction costs, speed up settlement and reduce failed payments, while letting customers manage or cancel authorisations in their banking app.

Jellyfish Energy plans to use the method to support flexible payment options linked to its rewards-based platform. The supplier, which serves small and medium-sized businesses, has built its model around rewarding reliable payment behaviour and giving customers more visibility over energy costs.

GoCardless has worked in account-to-account payments for more than a decade and has expanded into open banking in recent years. More than 37,000 organisations have used its open banking payment services alongside its broader direct debit and bank payment offering.

It has also been involved in earlier stages of the UK’s open banking payment rollout. In 2019, it processed what it described as the UK’s first live Variable Recurring Payment transaction in a sandbox environment, and it has since joined the list of approved open banking suppliers for central and local government.

Commercial shift

The latest test is notable because recurring Pay by Bank has largely been discussed in the context of sweeping, where customers move money between accounts they control. Extending that framework to merchant payments is seen by advocates as a necessary step if open banking is to become a more direct rival to established methods for regular billing.

GoCardless said its system includes a routing process that moves payers to Direct Debit where open banking is unavailable, aiming to widen coverage. It also highlighted a feature that uses historic payer data to help pre-fill payment details, and said the platform has recorded 99.5% uptime.

Those operational details matter in sectors such as energy, where regular billing, payment certainty and customer retention are closely monitored. Suppliers serving smaller businesses are particularly exposed to cash flow pressure and late-payment risk, making payment method choice more significant than it may appear at checkout.

“We’re thrilled to process the first live recurring Pay by Bank transaction with Jellyfish Energy, a major milestone as the industry prepares for the launch of this next-gen payment method. Recurring Pay by Bank offers a unique blend of speed, security and ease, helping forward-looking businesses like Jellyfish Energy unlock new revenue models, greater efficiency and best-in-class customer relationships,” Pat Phelan, Chief Revenue Officer at GoCardless, said.

“By leaning on our 15 years of experience in account-to-account payments, we can bring this technology to market with the proven reliability that businesses need. This will help them adapt with total confidence, knowing their payment operations won’t miss a beat,” Phelan added.

Energy use case

For Jellyfish Energy, the appeal is more predictable collections combined with a payment option that sits within customers’ banking apps. The company operates from Newcastle and also has offices in Edinburgh and Manchester, serving thousands of SME customers and working with more than 650 partners across the UK.

Its platform gives customers and partners visibility over payments, charges and ratings. That focus on transparency has become a point of distinction in a market where business customers often complain about complex billing and limited flexibility in payment terms.

“At Jellyfish, we’ve built our entire business model around rewarding reliable payment behaviour and giving customers real transparency and control over their energy costs. Recurring Pay by Bank is the next natural stage of that philosophy, giving our business customers flexibility and payment reliability that ultimately enables us to offer better rates,” said Aidon Hudson, Chief Executive Officer of Jellyfish Energy.

“Our industry is often seen as traditional and inflexible, which is why we’re excited to be at the forefront of bringing open banking payment solutions to the business energy sector, where they can deliver much-needed value to SMEs managing cash flow,” Hudson added.

The broader push behind Pay by Bank comes as the UK payments sector looks for alternatives to cards and, in some use cases, longstanding direct debit systems. GoCardless processes more than USD $130 billion in payments annually across more than 30 countries, giving it a sizeable base from which to test whether recurring open banking payments can move from industry pilots into routine commercial billing.