Bob Diamond and Fred Goodwin may be seen as the big villains of the banking system, but it's not those two that are the big problem. The whole system is rotten and it's ruining the lives of good, hardworking people.

I never had any desire to be a banker. My company sells minibuses and I have a lot of very good customers who I've known for a long time. Once the credit crunch hit in 2008, these people couldn't get a loan from the banks they had been with for years and therefore couldn't afford to get a new minibus. That threatened to be a very big problem for my business.

I had to do something drastic to keep going through the recession, so I began lending my own money to my customers. Unlike the banks, I knew they were good and honest people who could be trusted. I was proven right, and it made me see just how far wrong the banks had gone.

As time went on, the crunch hit Burnley hard. Businesses were being replaced by TO LET signs every day. There just wasn't any money to get things moving, so I thought that extending what I'd done to help my business customers might be a way to help people in my hometown.

Lending money to my customers had made me realise that banking was actually quite a simple process: you just take people's money and then lend it out to other people, making sure you charge them more interest than you pay out. So I thought maybe I could open a tiny bank to serve the local community. Not a big bank but maybe a better bank. How hard could it be?

As it turned out: very bloody difficult. The Financial Services Authority (FSA) wouldn't even meet me unless I put millions of pounds in a protected account with them. The tiny bank I wanted to create was never going to need that much security, but their demands meant that there was no chance of me getting a banking licence.

It's hard for me to see how the FSA is protecting consumers when Barclays and the rest can spend years manipulating interest rates right under their noses, but they won't even sit down with me for a cup of tea to discuss helping my community.

Luckily, I'm not the sort of person that gives up easily. Even more luckily, a lot of people shared my vision of creating a better way of banking for Burnley. From my top-notch lawyers in Manchester to the builders and painters who helped me turn an old florist's shop into a "bank", I've had an amazing amount of support.

The FSA still won't meet me to talk about a licence, so I legally can't call what I do a "bank" without quotation marks. But what matters at the moment is that we're open and making a difference. Seeing a business thrive, when it could have gone under without a little bit of money at the right time makes me so happy.

We now lend an average of £25,000 a week. Unlike the bankers in the City, we don't pay ourselves bonuses; every penny of our operating profit goes to charity. I'm proud that I've started on a journey for better banking in Burnley, and hopefully it'll end up with better banking for all of Britain.

My dream is for small "banks" like mine to spring up all over the country, and to go back to a system of banking that's focussed on people, not bonuses. This whole process has felt like jumping off a cliff and building a plane on the way down. Hopefully, thanks to what I have learned, other people will at least have some of the tools to change how we bank in Britain.

• Bank of Dave starts at 9pm, Thursday 12 July on Channel 4