Amir Nooriala , COO , OakNorth

you can scale up for these random events and not crash ,” Nooriala comments , “ and when you have an agile team that ’ s fully motivated and bought into the company , they ’ ll put in the hours to bring something forward .”

As OakNorth grows , Nooriala is adamant that cloud technology will drive its expansion . “ We ’ re not tied to anything . Being on the cloud means we can change a lot quicker , scale up or down on demand . We ’ re not tied to a physical location . In addition , the tools that come from providers like AWS as part and parcel of the cloud experience will allow OakNorth to experiment with new technologies . “ That ’ s something key to tech companies : we can experiment , fail , pull out and try something different ,” he adds . To fulfil Nooriala ’ s lofty ambitions for OakNorth over the next two years , the business will continue to grow organically , looking outside Europe toward APAC and the US to raise more awareness of its service . SoftBank ’ s funding will be used to expand capabilities to North American banks so they , too , can better serve SMEs and the unicorn ’ s AI and machine learning capabilities will be further strengthened to that OakNorth can continue in its aim to help those underserved businesses grow and flourish .

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