ALLICA BANK
His career spans both traditional banking giants and disruptive fintechs – a combination that has informed Allica’ s approach to serving established SMEs.
“ My career has got quite different parts to it,” Richard explains.“ I was at Barclays and HSBC, which are clearly very large traditional banks, and OakNorth and Revolut – two leading UK fintech unicorns.”
It was at Barclays where Richard first developed his understanding of SME banking needs.“ I’ m always grateful to Barclays for taking a risk on me. Back in 2007, I was pretty young and had a background in strategy consulting and they gave me the southeast region for SMEs to run.”
This early exposure provided crucial insights that would later shape Allica’ s approach.“ I learned a tonne of stuff from that – what the clients were like, what they needed from their banking products – but also, from the HSBC and Barclays side, I saw firsthand the problems they had in serving these types of businesses.”
His subsequent roles at fintech disruptors added another dimension to his expertise.“ From the fintech side, Revolut in particular is absolutely worldclass at product and engineering.
“ So, there were a lot of takeaways from that in terms of how a truly digital-native company goes about building technology for customers.”
This fusion of experiences has been central to Allica’ s proposition.“ I’ m pretty certain we’ d have little of our current success without that fusion of experiences – and not just myself.
“ Some of my key team have a combination of experience in a major bank and experience in a tech-driven company and I think that combination of skills is rare but very powerful.”
Meeting the unique needs of established businesses The bank’ s target market – businesses with approximately five to 250 employees – represents roughly one-
52 May 2025