The move comes just over a month after Zopa pledged to sponsor up to 50 work visas of eligible Ukrainian applicants, joining a consortium of firms offering to help such as Tesco, Marks & Spencer, AstraZeneca and Nestle.

Asos, the online fashion house, said earlier this month that it was looking to employ “double digits” of refugees in technology engineering roles based in the UK, due to Ukraine’s “strong skillset in this area”.

Research by WorldSkills UK and published late last year found that while 60pc of businesses believe their reliance on advanced digital skills will increase over the next five years, the number of people taking IT subjects at GCSE level has fallen by 40pc since 2015.
 
Zopa, which is planning to float on the stock market later this year, gained a full banking licence in 2020 and is expected to announce its first month of profitability since rebranding as a bank on Monday. It started as a peer-to-peer lender, but closed that arm of the group in December.

Spokespeople for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport did not respond to a request for comment.