BUSINESS PROFILE
How will the Scale-up Unit help Allica Bank grow?
Allica was one of a select few firms invited to participate in the PRA and FCA’ s newly launched Scale-up Unit, a joint regulatory initiative designed to support fast-growing financial services firms to scale, invest and create high-skilled jobs across the UK.
We’ ve been at the forefront of calls for this kind of dedicated support, engaging closely with both the regulators on the unit’ s design, working alongside Innovate Finance’ s Unicorn Council to make the case for a framework that keeps pace with the needs of genuinely scaling businesses, not just start-ups finding their feet.
In practical terms, participation gives Allica access to out-of-cycle capital reviews, early-stage engagement on new product launches and the ability to shape policy proposals that affect challenger banks as they grow.
How do you see financial services changing in the next few years? of established SMEs in mind from day one, rather than retrofitting a consumer platform.
What established SMEs want today is what Allica provides – business banking how it used to be, just better. In practice that means a bank that knows who you are, understands the challenges you’ re facing and has total visibility of your relationship when you call. But it also means self-serve options intuitive enough that most of the time you won’ t need to call.
What’ s next for Allica Bank?
Our ambition is to become the full-service bank of choice for every established SME in the UK. Our target of 10 % market share by 2028 is ambitious but everything we’ re building points in one direction.
Technology will continue to lead the way. We’ ve built our in-house stack from the ground up, purpose-built for the complexity of established SME banking, and we’ re continuing to invest heavily in AI to make our products faster, smarter and more powerful.
The future is specialisation. The era of one-size-fits-all banking is ending, with businesses increasingly seeking out partners that understand their specific challenges rather than offering generic products.
Technology is the engine behind that shift. Things will become faster and more accurate. But the development we’ re most excited about is AI. Agentic AI, in particular, is perfect for addressing the complexity and volume requirements of established businesses – helping us to support these businesses at scale.
At Allica, we’ ve built what we believe is a market-first for commercial lending – an end-to-end agent that can take on an unstructured email loan request, extracts and analyses the content, calls our decisioning engine and returns a decision. If there is information missing, it also sends an email back explaining the gaps.
But the human element won’ t disappear and trust will be more critical than ever. The FinTechs best positioned for the future will be those that have proven their path to profitability and demonstrated they can be relied upon for the long term.
As Agentic AI starts to reshape financial services, our position as the UK’ s only full-service digital bank for established SMEs will become increasingly powerful. We’ re entering this new era with a structural advantage that legacy banks and others relying on thirdparty systems cannot replicate. Our engineering teams are already developing and deploying AI agents across the full technology stack and we’ re working on what we believe will be a revolutionary approach to complex SME lending using AI agents built entirely on our own proprietary data. This gives customers a far superior experience – be it interacting with us 24 / 7 or getting lending decisions back much faster.
On products, we will continue to build out our full lending suite. From commercial mortgages, asset finance, growth finance, overdrafts, to our recently acquired receivables finance capability through Kriya. Our rapidly scaling Business Rewards Account, Cards and SME Deposits complete the service proposition for our SME customers. x
How have customer expectations changed?
The customer experience established SMEs receive from their bank has long trailed behind personal banking and businesses are growing less willing to accept that gap.
The owners we serve are consumers first. They use Monzo and Apple Pay and expect an intuitive, speedy experience. When they switch to their business banking app and find fragmented, dated tech, the contrast is stark. Equally, our customers have more complex needs, and when they have to assess options for those, they are looking for human support.
There are lessons to be learned from innovations in consumer banking but we’ ve built our technology entirely with the needs
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