Data released by national law firm Bond Dickinson found that the volume of collaborative deals between financial services and SMEs hit 580 in 2015/16, before falling by 22% in 2016/17.

There were 452 financial services collaborative deals with SMEs in 2016/17 at a total value of more than £6.2bn.

Over the last four years there has been 1,864 financial services deals, valued at more than £31bn.

Ben Butler, partner at Bond Dickinson, said: “Partnering with start-ups has become a key element to the digital transformation strategies which are now of vital importance to the financial services sector's prospects.

“Large firms' ability to innovate can be held back by dependence on legacy systems, while dynamic young SMEs have the advantage of developing from scratch.

“These partnerships combine the best of agility and scale to deliver improvements for customers and the sector as a whole.

“Despite complex and changing regulation – such as the Open Banking Initiative and PSD2 – financial services have faced disruption head-on, embracing the advantages of collaborative innovation and start-up incubation.

“The challenge now is to keep this up and not be distracted by political uncertainty.”

In financial services, minority stake investments remain the most popular collaboration vehicle between SMEs and large organisations, accounting for 75% of deals since 2013/14, three times as many deals as mergers and acquisitions (25%).

Almost 60% (1,390) of the 2,409 minority stake purchases conducted between large organisations and UK SMEs from 2013/14 to 2016/17 involved financial services firms.

£14.3bn was invested in these minority stake deals.