ALLICA BANK assets, typically property, but not enough going into helping businesses grow and become more productive.”
He sees this as a fundamental issue affecting the UK’ s economic performance and believes Allica has a role to play in addressing it.
The bank actively measures whether the businesses it serves are growing faster than the overall economy average.
“ Our purpose is helping support businesses and helping businesses to grow,” Richard explains.“ We actually check: are businesses that Allica works with growing faster than the overall economy average? And pleasingly, that’ s yes, and by quite a decent distance.”
This focus on stimulating real economic growth through productive lending differentiates Allica from many mainstream lenders who predominantly focus on residential mortgages – which Richard describes as“ ultimately an unproductive asset” when financing existing rather than new housing.
“ By financing a house that’ s not a new house being built, you’ re just pushing up house prices through more and more competition around house price financing,” Richard explains.
Technology driving client relationships Allica’ s technology strategy goes beyond building efficient internal systems. It is fundamentally about enhancing client relationships and improving the customer experience across all touchpoints. The bank maintains a hyper-focus on its chosen market segment.“ We are very religious about the segment,” Richard explains.
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“ We focus on an established SMEs – not consumer, never corporate. That really helps you to constantly think about what that segment needs and build products and services that work for it.”
This laser focus has enabled Allica to build a reputation for understanding the unique needs of established businesses.
While the bank does offer self-service options via its app, it recognises that many clients in this segment still want the ability to speak with a knowledgeable human when needed.
“ We think for this segment people still want a human to talk to,” Richard says.“ Our view is very much about how do you provide self-serve options for clients that want it but also provide a human, and then, to be able to afford it, how do you automate everything that sits behind that human?”
In addition to serving SMEs directly, Allica works with key intermediaries in the ecosystem.“ In lending, we tend to work a lot with some of the professionals out there, like the commercial finance brokers.
“ Their entire day-to-day job is that they may have 50, 100, 200 SMEs they work with and are helping them find finance. So we build tools specifically for those brokers and similarly for accountants.”
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