Allica Bank recently joined the ranks of the FinTech unicorns, achieving a valuation of close to US$1.2 billion. It has also been named the most recommended business bank, as well as one of the UK’s fastest growing companies. With this in mind, it aims to achieve a 10% share of the established SME market by 2028. Niv Subramanian, Deputy Chief Executive Officer at Allica Bank, discusses the impressive growth of the company, its deliberate focus on established SMEs and the changing face of financial services.
Tell me more about Allica Bank and how it started.
Allica Bank was founded on a simple observation that established businesses – those with between five and 250 employees – were being systematically underserved by the UK’s major banks. Too large for standardised consumer style banking and too small for traditional corporate divisions. Despite collectively driving a third of UK GDP and employment, they have been largely ignored.
When Allica received its banking license from the PRA in 2019, it was a significant milestone for us, but the real challenge was then building a bank from the ground up. This meant designing a powerful technology infrastructure and combining it with genuine human relationships and products tailored to the specific needs of established businesses.
We launched in 2020 with commercial mortgages, before expanding into savings and asset finance. By 2022 we had passed £1 billion in both lending and deposits and became profitable on a monthly basis in 2022, one of the fastest UK FinTechs ever to do so.
Since then, we’ve continued to broaden our proposition. At the heart of our offer is the Business Rewards Account – a business current account built specifically for established SMEs. In 2025 we saw rapid growth in its uptake, with the number of account holders and balances more than doubling over the year.
Allica is Britain’s fastest-ever growing FinTech – how has it ensured this impressive growth?
Allica’s growth has been driven by a clear and deliberate focus on established SMEs. Rather than trying to be all things to all people, we built everything around the specific needs of businesses with five to 250 employees and that’s proven to be a significant competitive advantage.
We have invested heavily in building our own tech infrastructure, allowing us to deliver an experience that is more powerful and more personal than the legacy banks can offer. Every customer has a dedicated relationship manager who understands their business, backed by tools that make it genuinely easy to bank.
The results speak for themselves. Total outstanding lending to established SMEs is £4 billion. In addition to being the fastest growing FinTech ever, Allica was also named the UK’s fastest growing company in 2024 by The Times.
We also recently joined the ranks of the FinTech unicorns, achieving a valuation of close to US$1.2 billion following our US$155 million Series D raise. This is not just a strong vote of confidence from investors in our model but allows us to further boost our lending, enhance our tech and continue to grow as we consider a potential expansion into Europe.
Allica Bank aims to achieve a 10% share of the established SME market by 2028 – how do you plan to achieve this?
Achieving 10% market share comes down to the simple idea that if you offer established SMEs something they genuinely need but aren’t getting elsewhere, and then deliver on it, the businesses you serve become your best advocates.
Incumbents are held back by legacy systems not designed with established SMEs in mind, leading to manual processes, poor insight and a customer experience that leaves businesses feeling sidelined.
At the centre of our proposition is the Business Rewards Account, alongside a suite of products established SMEs actually need, including our recently launched business overdraft. SME overdraft availability has collapsed by over 80% since 2000, leaving a £15 billion gap. Businesses can now apply for our new overdraft, with limits between £25,000 and £2 million and decisions made in days. It’s a good example of us identifying where the system has let SMEs down and fixing it.
Underpinning all of it is our proprietary technology, purpose-built to offer customers an experience that’s rewarding, powerful and human when it matters. The result is that businesses recommend us and that recommendation is how we grow.
You’ve just been named most recommended business bank – why do you think this is?
This recognition means everything to us because it comes directly from our customers. Not judged by industry experts but based on customer feedback from more than 4,000 real businesses about their experience with banking providers. To be the most recommended business bank has always been our north star, because it shows we’re building something that genuinely works.
The reason businesses recommend us is because we’re doing something different. We provide a relationship manager whose name you know, a current account that gives established SMEs real value and rewards and technology that makes life easier, not harder.
Most business owners feel, at best, ignored by their bank. We think that’s unacceptable and proving there’s a better way to do things is exactly what those 4,000 recommendations reflect.
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?
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.
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 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.
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 third-party 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.
