Under his watch, Allica Bank was named the UK's fastest-growing business of 2023 and just recently 2024 by Deloitte in its Technology Fast Fifty Awards. Alright, thank you for joining us today. To kick us off, can you maybe take us right back to the very, very beginning? I'm interested in what led you on your journey.

Yeah, so there's many people who come out of university, particularly top universities, with a really clearly defined plan of action and plan of career. I was the complete opposite. I kind of stumbled out of university without any plan at all.

And actually, in retrospect, I don't regret that at all.

Can I ask what you studied at university?

I studied lots of ologies and philosophy. So unemployable stuff, basically.

But so I luckily went to a university where people tend to overlook that stuff on their CV.

So I went to a fairly prestigious university. So I kind of stumbled out without any plan other than the fact I wanted to see the world. So I got, I did a bit of temporary work. I got myself on a plane to India, and I thought, right, six months I'll see the world, then I'll get started with my career.

I turned out to be much slower travelling than I expected, and, like, after eight weeks, I was still on the same beach as where I had landed. So I took longer. I took a number of years to see the world, basically.

Lovely.

So I'm notable, actually. I didn't get my first permanent job until I was in my late twenties, I think 27. Right.

Now that happens all the time in Germany, but generally because they'd done like five PhDs. For me it was because I was travelling around the world and doing temporary jobs in between. So yeah, so around 27 I got sat down by a fierce auntie who said to me I need to get a qualification and sort my life out. So the only way I could maintain my then standard of living was to study accountancy in an investment bank.

An investment bank, for those that know, it's the City, it's the Wolf of Wall Street-type City of London. So I went into one of the big investment banks to study accountancy.

Bluntly, I hated that job. I did it for like two or three years, but I got my qualification.

And then I began to think that maybe I'd find strategy interesting, and that sounded like an interesting part of business. So I managed to get myself a job at the same bank in strategy, and then I moved into one of the big sort of high-street banks to do a strategy role, sort of corporate strategy, which means you're kind of like, you know, who should we buy, which countries should we go into, that kind of quite exciting side of things. And I have to say, I did genuinely enjoy that and find it really interesting. So I'd say that's the first job I had where I kind of felt I had a career. Yeah. But by this point, we're like in my early thirties, right?

So I'm quite rare in that respect.

So I accidentally got into the sort of startup lifestyle because I am a startup entrepreneur now. What would be my accidentally is that I'd done my sort of three-year tour of duty in the strategy team of a big bank, and usually you don't spend your career doing that kind of role. It's a thing where you go to kind of accelerate your knowledge and your skills.

And I wanted to, well, I found a very small division of the bank that was working on new technology services, and I thought I'll go and get myself a nice job title there and then I'll move back into the big part of the bank and get a big job.

But actually what I discovered in this small tiny offshoot, which was, by the way, above some crappy branch in Shoreditch before Shoreditch was cool, actually I discovered we had a lot of autonomy in that division. We got to build things quickly, experiment. I actually discovered that that's what I wanted to do. I didn't want to go back into large organisations, that's what I wanted to do. And that led me to become an entrepreneur.

So after a few years there, I founded my own business, which is a business called Funding Options.

Funding Options is Europe's leading comparison service for small business lending. So you're a small business, you can't get a loan from the big banks, where do you go next? It's a real problem to solve. So I thought, you know, the world's going digital, the world needs a comparison site, and actually in my business plan I said, you know, MoneySuperMarket for business lending, with MoneySuperMarket being the dominant comparison site. So I set out to build that business.

I was the sole founder, so founder and CEO. I didn't have anyone else with me. So it started with me literally in my bedroom, you know, at the weekends, all the way to when I left the business, almost one hundred people and, you know, a fairly scaled business. So I've kind of been through that startup journey, scale-up journey.

What was the time from sitting on your own in your bedroom to one hundred people?

It was about seven or eight years. My journey at Funding Options was seven or eight years, depending on how you measure sort of day one.

But yeah, I mean, that's an interesting thing to talk about because the first two or three years was an absolute disaster.

Right. So the business went round in circles for two or three years, and actually in retrospect the reason for that is really simple, in that my skill set and tool set had been built in big corporations.

The analogy I always give to people is that what you learn in a big corporation is how to drive a supertanker.

These big corporations, they're not very manoeuvrable, they're very hard to stop and start, but they have enormous momentum. Yeah. And it's a skill set on its own to keep the thing going. Right?

But a startup is an utterly different beast.

Almost the opposite. Very agile. No momentum.

It's a speedboat. Exactly. It's a speedboat. And actually this is a lecture I found myself giving to a lot of my team members along the way at Allica, because they've often come from big banks.

Yeah.

And what it is is basically if you are, you know, if they're the supertanker, and bear in mind every startup has incumbents they're up against, and the incumbents usually are orders of magnitude bigger. And they have almost every advantage in their favour. They have brands, customers to sell to, just huge distribution, in our case branch networks and banks.

They have almost every advantage: they have corporate learnings, corporate memory, infrastructure, they have almost every advantage.

But you've got speed and agility, okay?

And it's super important about how you think about firstly how you run the business and also your strategy. So, you know, if you're a speedboat and they're a supertanker, what you really want to avoid is getting in front of the supertanker, don't you? Yeah. So you need to manoeuvre around, you need to start and stop quickly, and actually you need to hug the coast sometimes. They can go out in the open ocean, but maybe you can hug the coast. So you need to find a part of the market where you can really grow and expand without being crushed.

And then when you're big enough, then you go and fight them head to head. So yeah, so I'd come from large corporate, and I was fairly competent at running a supertanker, and it turned out it was the wrong skill set. And look, if I'd been a bit more humble at the time, there are many books that would have told me this was the case.

There's famously a book called The Lean Startup that basically says stop thinking, launch. Burn, yeah. Well, I spent too much time thinking. And actually, you know, the reality is I thought, well, bear in mind this was quite some time ago.

This was when Mark Zuckerberg was quite new at Facebook, and there was this kind of fashionable thing that startup founders were eighteen-year-olds with hoodies. And I was like, well, I'm sure that works for them, but I've got a strategy background, I don't need to do that stuff, so I can do some desktop research and figure it all out. Well, it turns out I was wrong.

So yeah, so basically I spent two or three years going around in circles in my miniature supertanker, and then I learnt the discipline of building a motorboat, which then eventually became, well, let's call it a cruise line. There you go.

So yeah, so that was my journey. Pretty brutal first two or three years, you know. So to answer your question, I was running the business for seven or eight years, two or three of these years fairly lost years, and then basically things took off and we grew exponentially from there.

When you look back on that time now, is there a kind of inflection point that you recognised, that something had either shifted within the business or something had shifted in your approach to managing the business, which enabled it to... what I'm curious to know is what that was.

I think it's the latter. Something had shifted in my management style, which is that one of the things that I learned the hard way is just such a simple and unarguable fact, but it's also something most of us do not face as fact, which is basically that the professional world you live in is awash with data points telling you that you're wrong, and most of us would rather ignore those data points and focus on the ones that confirm our bias.

And it's when I began to face into those facts and embrace them and learn to love them, learn to love them, we'll talk about it later. In other words, everyone else — I did have competitors — and I beat them all. And I think part of that was because I learnt to love the things that, based on the hard facts, didn't necessarily fit my narrative.

In my case, or in the case of Funding Options, the entire thesis was let's take this entirely digital. So there are people who help businesses to find finance.

And there's actually thousands of people doing that in the country, and they do it very traditionally, sometimes very inefficiently with paper and faxes.

I thought: digitalise everything. But it turned out the market wasn't necessarily ready for that, and the customer wasn't necessarily ready for that. And if there's one data point above all else that was the inflection point, it was understanding that when I looked at the data, the majority of the revenues we were making were from a relatively small number of our customers who had effectively a concierge service.

So in other words, what is now fashionably called high-tech, high-touch. Right. The inflection point was figuring out that I was going to build a model that wasn't purely digital. It was using digital to deliver a better personal service to customers.

Right.

Right. And that inflection point and knowing that before everyone else was why we won, because our revenue engine started roaring before everyone else's, which then allows you to feed the acquisition engine, then you get into the virtuous circle.

And as I said, there was a golden period then where we grew — one year we grew three times and then two times and then two times again. So exponential is a misused word, but we grew exponentially for a number of years. It's a really exciting time, scaling a business when it's going well is a really exciting thing to do, and I'm now happily doing that again.

Yeah, just before we leave this part of your story, what made you decide to exit the business after being on such a roaring ride? Really, I imagine it is very, very kind of like adrenaline. I imagine it's a hard thing to stop doing.

Honestly, quite the opposite, because the reason I left was I had nothing left in the tank.

Oh, really?

I was done.

Yeah.

So it literally drained the energy out of me.

And actually, you know, there was probably eighteen months where I was going to the office and there wasn't the fire in my belly left anymore. Right? In other words, I knew it was time to go, but you can't just walk off the pitch. Right?

You know, if you're the sole founder, it's almost like ripping the spinal cord out of a business. You've got to transition carefully. And by the way, let me be really clear, investors and my directors knew that was the case. They knew it. It was probably more driven by them than me, but basically, you know, seven or eight years being a sole founder in a startup.

And here's the thing. There's a kind of feature, not bug, in the startup world. Right?

And when I say startup, I'm not talking about setting up your own little side-of-the-desk home business, selling perfume or something like that. I'm talking about trying to build a business that's going to change the world.

Yeah.

There's this kind of feature, not bug, that the only way you can do that is by basically faking it until you make it.

Because if everyone thinks you're killing it and doing amazingly, then you attract capital, and then you attract the best people, and then you get into this virtuous circle.

The reality is it is utterly, crushingly brutal to be a startup founder. Now I'm sure that's not the case for some startup founders, but I guarantee you it's the case for the majority. But no one's able to talk about that.

You know, I'm lucky. I've successfully exited the business, and I've moved on and had a really good outcome for the business and stuff. It's in a really good home, so I can talk about that. But the reality is I had nothing left.

So I took a year off.

So yeah, to answer your question, I was utterly relieved when I left the office. That's all I felt.

Yeah.

And I had tons of people reaching out to me. It's like this must be really hard for you. I'm like this honestly is great. I'm back off to India, you know, that beach.

I wish. Maybe one day.

So yeah, I had a happy year off. I was advising other startup founders, some fairly well-known ones — Anne Boden, a very successful founder of Starling Bank everyone would have heard of — and a few others. I had a happy year of dabbling, but largely speaking just recharging my batteries. So that was the answer. I was done.

Now obviously we've all heard of Starling Bank. Your role at that point was?

I was just an advisor. I was there for a few months just advising. So they had a particular bit of the business that they needed to get up and running, and it aligned to my particular experience. So I was there as an advisor. I had a really happy few months there, but it was an advisory consultancy role. At this point, I wasn't really up for getting stuck into anything long term. I needed some time off.

So moving into your current role, and I'm just going to read out your current job title to make sure I get it right, you're now Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Allica Bank. What are your main roles, and what have you been up to since launch, I think, in twenty twenty?

For those that don't know, it's a bank focused on the small business segment. We're a relatively new bank. We got a bank licence something like five years ago.

Now, you know, banking is a complex topic. To get a bank licence takes many, many years. Why is that? Because banks are one of the small number of institutions that look after ordinary people's money. The bar to be a bank is extremely high, as it should be. Yeah.

So a team had gone and got the bank licence. Once they'd got the bank licence, a new leadership team was coming in to build the bank.

And our CEO had been recruited to build the bank. He was really excited about building it.

He and I go back quite a long way, back to my strategy role actually at one of the banks.

Yeah.

So we'd known each other for about fifteen years. We stayed in touch, shared lots of intellectual interests. I was looking for my next thing to get stuck into, and he's like, I'm going to build a bank. Do you want to come along? Do you want to come on the journey? I was like, yeah, I want to do that.

And by the way, I'll front-answer the question I get asked all the time: why didn't you start another business? I didn't want to at that time. This is my answer.

So I didn't want to throw myself back in. In my year off, I decided I don't want to be CEO and I don't want to found a business. Now neither of those are never-never decisions.

I was thinking about this on the way over. I suspect I may go again one more time before I'm done.

But at that point in time, I was like, why would I throw myself back into that?

So I was really glad to join, be part of something a bit bigger, and actually for someone else to have the weight of being the CEO on their shoulders.

So yeah. So it was kind of the perfect thing for me.

We get on well, he's an amazing CEO, exceptional CEO, I knew he'd be.

So yeah, it was just an exciting project to build a bank.

It's not every day you get invited into a gig like that.

Exactly, so it was an easy decision for me, basically aligned to what I decided I wanted to do.

When the conversation started, was there a role? Did your CEO have a role in mind for you? Is it a role that you kind of co-designed and said, look, I'm in, but I would like to take this. This is the part that interests me.

So basically, he was looking for someone with, I think his phrase was breadth. Okay. So let me just unpick that.

To be able to have a new bank, you basically have to have specialists in each of the key functions. So chief financial officer of a bank, unsurprisingly, is quite a heavyweight role, as is chief risk officer. So you're expected to have people in these specialist roles that are deeply experienced, probably spent twenty or thirty years doing that one thing, being a chief financial officer or chief risk officer, whatever it may be in a bank. So we had all of those lined up. I think our CEO was looking for someone who had breadth, and I, of course, had been a CEO. So I like to joke I'm the chief AOB officer. Lots of things consolidate around me.

Right.

Yeah. So my current responsibilities are product and strategy, obviously, per my title. I've got marketing I've had from day one, partnerships, ESG. I've had data along the way.

I've had all sorts of things, basically. And I think it's that kind of breadth of someone who's a bit more of a Swiss Army knife, basically. Yeah. But from a personal perspective, the bits around business I particularly enjoy — strategy we talked about, I just find that interesting, and I think I'm quite good at it, by the way.

Products and strategy for me are just two sides of the same coin. Yeah.

And marketing, because what I like about marketing is that on the one hand it's extremely data-driven, but on the other hand it's creative, and I'm quite a creative person. So yeah, to some extent my role reflects what I like doing, but I like doing stuff I think I'm good at, so there's kind of no coincidence there.

Yeah. So let's go back then to the, I think you started in2020? That right?

About then. Yeah.

So where are we now?

2024.

We're talking about this early, but let's get it locked down on camera and audio. Second year being the fastest-growing business in the UK?

So yeah, so there's an annual list called the Sunday Times Fast Track 100, which is the fastest-growing companies in the UK.

So we are number one — the fastest-growing company in the UK — but we only actually found this out quite recently. We're the fastest-growing in the history of that list, which is almost thirty years. To put it another way, we're the fastest-growing company in the UK this century.

Am I right in saying that the previous company that held that prestigious title was Deliveroo?

Yeah, so there's another — I mean, frankly we're top of all of the rankings — there's another one of the fastest-growing tech companies, which is run by Deloitte, the big accounting firm. So we're only the second company in history to top it twice in a row, and the only other company to do that is Deliveroo.

Deliveroo. Yeah. Well, congratulations.

Yeah. I mean, look, I thought we would be successful, and we'll talk about why I thought that with such high conviction because it's about strategy.

But I never thought it would be quite this successful. I think we're always a bit surprised. And to some extent become a bit immune to the latest accolade you get. Yeah. Whereas, you know, if you told me any of these things would be true four years ago, I wouldn't really have believed you.

I'm interested to chart how that success has happened within the context of your role and almost giving us an overview of, okay, twenty twenty, year one, bank's literally just got its licence.

Presumably at that point it's still relatively an idea. You've got to go and build a business. You've got to go and build a brand. You've got to build a client base. Where on earth do you start?

Fundamentally, no matter how good your execution can be, if your strategy isn't fairly solid, you're kind of dead.

So let's start there, right?

We are laser-focused in our strategy, and our strategy has been extremely consistent through the life of Allica. So what is that strategy?

Above all else, the focus is around who we exist for. Okay. So we exist for what we would internally call established SMEs, or if you're American, SMBs.

Now let me just unpick that a bit. In the UK there's five point five million SMEs.

Actually five million of them — ninety percent — are tiny businesses. They're a person with a van, a person with a ladder, a person with hairdressing scissors. Those are not Allica customers. We exist for 10% of SMEs, about half a million businesses that are quite established.

They tend to have dozens of employees, for example, and millions in turnover. So we're laser-focused on the segment. Fortunately for us, that segment's a third of the economy. So point number one: you can't grow a great company in a small segment — ours is a big segment.

So why did we focus in on that segment? The reason we focus in is because the incumbents, the big high-street banks, the names we all know and don't necessarily love, struggle with our segment. So I talked earlier about supertankers. They're the supertankers.

We chose a bit of the market where we're not going to run into the supertanker.

Okay.

Was this strategy designed before the bank licence was obtained?

Yeah. I mean, you know, it refines after that, but yeah, fundamentally. And actually, I mean, I've been on my own intellectual journey of learning the opportunity. It's one of the reasons I joined, but our CEO had been on a different intellectual journey and made the same conclusion.

In his words, it's the last great opportunity in banking. So very focused on a segment that's half a million target customers — not that many — but a third of the economy, so quite a big pool.

So why do the big banks struggle with that segment? Well, the big banks in industry terms are called universal banks.

That means they're all things to all people. They serve all the way from the poorest student to the largest corporation like Vodafone or Google.

But at their core, they make most of their money from two polar opposite segments.

One is consumers — people like you and me. There's tens of millions of us. We're very similar, very homogeneous. We're very high volume. We're very simple in our financial needs.

So consumer: mass market, high volume, low value.

At the other extreme, you've got large corporates. They make a huge amount of money there as well. So the Vodafones are this as well. They're the polar opposite.

There's a very small number of them. They're extremely high value and they're extremely complex to deal with.

For consumers they give a purely digital experience, and for corporates they throw lots of high-quality people in suits. They're very good at it, by the way.

Now the five million micro businesses — a person with a van, freelance hairdressers — they are so similar to consumers that you can stick them on the same operating model and infrastructure.

Right.

My favourite example there is, believe it or not, the most popular form of finance for a micro business is a personal credit card.

Right. So yeah, they want to buy five thousand pounds of stock from a local cash and carry. Are they going to go and make a bank loan application? Or are they just going to use their MBNA card?

Our segment is really awkwardly stuck in the middle for the big banks because it's too low value for the Vodafone service with people in suits, but it's too complex for the consumer banking service, which is purely app-based and digital.

So our segment ends up getting underserved by the banks, so they don't invest in their operating model and servicing model for it. So you've got a third of the economy that's being left behind by the incumbent banks. So that was the soft underbelly that we targeted.

And by the way, we all love the segment as well.

These are ordinary businesses. And if you've built a business like we have, you have a lot of respect for these people.

If you want to picture an Allica customer, when you drive to a town you've never been before and you accidentally drive into an industrial estate and you have to do a U-turn and there are slightly shabby factories and warehouses — these are our customers.

They're unsung and unloved. You take them out of that town, that town is dead.

They are the core of the local economy.

It's the bit the big banks struggle with, and I'm gonna fight you very hard. So strategy was number one, and we've stayed laser-focused. We constantly get opportunities to do other things, but we feel we're just getting started. Although we're quite a big business now, we've got, like, you know, of our target customers that would say, “I bank with Allica, they're my bank,” not maybe they've got a loan with us or savings, but “I actually bank with them,” is less than one percent market share, so we can be a very big business before we run out of growth.

Number one was focus, and I say number two is disciplined execution. What I mean by disciplined execution: the trick in growing a business is not what you say you're going to do, it's what you decide not to do. As a CEO, for example, there's always ten things you have to do this quarter. You try and do more than three, you won't get anything done at all.

So discipline. So we were very good in terms of the phasing of our execution. We didn't try and build everything at once; we laid the components one by one pretty much to a sort of predefined plan that we'd understood upfront.

And then culture. Basically, we just have a natural culture of just getting things done.

And I'd make the observation that large organisations, particularly large banks, they're just awash with people who love to talk about or write PowerPoint presentations about what should be done. Yeah. Only a small proportion of people actually do anything of consequence. Right?

Allicans are people who have a bias towards getting stuff done. Right. We don't put any value on your PowerPoint slides or how eloquent you are in meetings. These things don't matter to us. It's doers that you're after.

But doers who do well.

Can I come back to the strategy piece? Because it's — yeah.

I understand the target customer that you're after, but for me there's a missing piece of the story there. You've identified who they are, but there's the service level that you want to give them, presumably, because you've looked at what the incumbents are not doing. It's not that there is that uncomfortable soft spot. What is it that you identified as this is what this unloved segment actually needs, and this is what we're going to focus on providing?

Yeah. So before I answer the question, a session I always have with my marketing team — marketing is one of my responsibilities — is that one of the problems we have from a marketing perspective is that the big banks, they don't put adverts on saying we hate small businesses. Right? Yeah.

They still put on these adverts, and it's mainly aimed at politicians, frankly, and the media, not at the customers themselves, where they've got a relationship manager wearing a hard hat, shaking hands with this gritty-looking business owner. Right?

So what I would say to them is if we tell people that's what we are, it's just noise, because they've seen it all before and they don't believe it's true, because they've seen that's not true. Right?

So we have to show, not tell. Okay?

So there are three reasons to bank with Allica, and each of them we have to show, not tell. Okay? So the first one is value.

So if you're a medium-sized business in the UK with a big bank, they would charge you fees for everything. They charge you fees to have an account, charge you fees to make payments. By the way, these are fees you wouldn't pay as a consumer for the same things, right? They charge you fees for everything.

We don't charge those fees, and actually we give value back. So we give cash back on your card spend — you're gonna want to bring your bank account to me by the end of this. And also we pay interest on balances as well. So in other words, the money you've got floating around, we pay generous interest on that.

So from a value perspective, we are literally poles apart. They will gouge you for lots of money; we're the other way around — we'll give you lots of money.

So value is point number one, and value is easy to sell. Right? It's clearly easy to sell.

Point number two is a relationship. So we do have — I talked earlier about my hard learning about the concierge model, right? — we unashamedly have a relationship-based bank. We don't try and do everything digitally. Every Allica customer has a relationship manager. So if something goes wrong or they've got a key question they want answered about their financial situation or whether to buy their premises, they can pick up the phone and speak to their relationship manager. That's what the SMEs in my segment used to have from the big banks. It was taken away.

Yeah. So again, show, don't tell. Now how do we show that one? Because I told you the adverts from the big banks pretend they have that.

The way we show it is on our website, you can literally go and see the contact details of our relationship managers. Right. So you try and speak to your relationship manager at some of the big banks — they'll put you through a chatbot pretending to be a person, and then a call centre, and another call centre, and another call centre. You might eventually, if you complain enough, get to speak to your relationship manager. Ours is right there to speak to.

So point number two is relationship.

And then the third one is speed and simplicity, which is fundamentally technology. So what we're trying to build, particularly with our current account, is a current account that's the most useful for customers in our segment.

So what does that mean in a practical sense? I talked about how the big banks typically try and service our customers on a consumer banking platform. What that means is a consumer banking platform is generally a single-player bank account, so in other words it's designed for one person to act on it. But if you're a mid-sized business that doesn't work.

You're going to have a credit controller whose job is to chase invoices, but you don't want them to have access to the bank account — or complete access — because they might see everyone's salaries. You want a finance controller who can raise payments, but you don't want them to be able to make payments or they might make a two-million-pound payment themselves and run off to Majorca. Your external accountant probably wants to read your transactions to do your accounts for you, but you don't want them to make payments.

So we're trying to build a multiplayer bank account that basically works really well for the problems in the day-to-day. That one, by the way, is a work in progress, right? We're at the start of the journey, not the end of the journey.

But I'm really excited about that, and actually one thing that really excites me is that most customers in our segment, they're big enough that they manage their finances elsewhere from their bank. It might be their accounting software, for example, or if they sell on Shopify, that's probably the centre of the financial universe.

Well guess what? What about if our bank account is designed not to force you to come and do online banking? What if our bank account is designed to make it easier to work where you want to work? So we kind of begin to think about how we might really transform it.

So that's the third area — value, speed and simplicity — and we're kind of on a journey there, and a very exciting one.

Thank you. Thanks for giving that. That gives me a much clearer understanding of where the business is.

Maybe your application tomorrow.

Yeah, absolutely. Charlie, who does all the fancy sitting in the back of revenue, is probably on there already looking for a discount code.

Let's go back to the point I was making before about the year one, year two, year three, four. Where do the different aspects — what was on your big to-do list if we go through those different stages?

Right. So there's actually two sides to a bank, right?

So what is a bank at a very intellectual level? A bank raises money from ordinary people and small businesses. In other words, the bank is where you put your savings.

So that's one side of the bank, and the other side of the bank lends, and it's largely speaking lending out that money. Okay. The reason that banks are so heavily regulated is because they're lending out ordinary people's money. Now there's infinite levels of complexity why what I just said isn't quite true. We have to hold huge amounts of capital as a sort of cushion, but fundamentally that's what a bank does.

Okay.

What that basically means is that to build an amazing bank, you need to have two equally weighted muscles — your savings and your lending.

Well, the one that we had to activate and be the best in the world at very early was the lending one, because that's how banks make money. So in our early days, we focused on activating the best lending division in the market, in our very specialist area. Specifically, by the way, this was lending against business property, so lending against a factory or warehouse. So just as homes have mortgages, so do factories and warehouses and hotels and shops.

So becoming the best in the country — and hopefully at one point the best in the world — at that was priority number one. We were lucky in that there's an easy-to-activate channel into that segment, which is professional brokers whose day job is to help businesses find that. So on day one we had one product — we're obviously building lots of other stuff — but in terms of what really mattered, one product, one channel.

And then slowly but surely, pretty much every three to six months, we launched the next component — another lending product, another channel. So two years in we had a direct franchise, we had our relationship managers around the country, and I'd built up a marketing capability — and a fairly strong marketing capability — to get in front of our target customers.

Most recently, for example, I've begun to push into accountants as a channel. So the most important — well statistically the most valued adviser to our segment — is the professional accountants who support them with their books.

So we've actually, very excitingly and very successfully, begun to push into that as a channel. So basically, in a very disciplined way: deploy, get it to a certain scale, hand over to management and move on to the next thing. And actually one of my roles has been that I tend to be — not always, but quite often — the one doing the land-and-expand of a new channel or new product, because my startup background makes me naturally suited to that.

Yep. So the current area that you're going for or breaking into is accountants?

Yeah. I mean, that's for me personally, right? The core bank remains focused on much bigger and more established channels that we have out there. But yeah, our accountancy channel — I've had a full team in place since early summer — but we've already just made a decision to double that team because it's going well.

So it is about — basically I might have talked about my failures as a startup founder. Luckily I've learned from that, right? I've become quite good at launching quickly and learning.

Now to give one example of that: when I decided to enter the accountancy channel, the decision was made actually eighteen months ago. It's just I didn't have a team in place until maybe nine months ago.

But the biggest accountancy conference was coming up a month after I decided to launch the channel. Now old Conrad would have been like, well, we're not ready for this.

New Conrad said, you know what, we're going to build a stand, we're going to go to the conference, because we're going to learn a lot at the conference.

I just dragged along some people, gave them a 101 on the accountancy channel, and we learned so much. It actually fundamentally changed my thinking and got me excited about the channel as well.

But the point is basically, you know, what's the worst that can happen if you turn up at a conference with a stand?

You're going to have a lot of conversations regardless, aren't you?

You're going to learn a lot, and actually a lot of the assumptions I had about what was important to accountants at that point in time were wrong.

That's a very — spending fifteen grand on a stand or whatever it was — is a very cheap way of finding out that you've got something fundamentally wrong.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a great insight, just that piece on its own.

So I was going to ask you about approach to research, of learning about your customers when you're talking about the launch phase, but that's one way that you're learning about how to break into various areas.

Right? I mean, it's — you wouldn't expect someone at my level to be mad, but I wanted to go and meet lots of accountants and talk to them. Right? What better way. And actually you also find what they're not interested in. I remember boring the crap out of some accountants about stuff that now is not central to our proposition, but I thought was really cool, so there you are.

One of the things we were discussing before we actually started recording, which I want to go back to, is the power of a brand.

We talked about an agency that you worked with that helped you build out the brand. I wonder if we could just cover off that story again, perhaps give me a little bit of an overview again of how you came across this particular agency.

So yeah, we're going to have to start by going right back to the relatively early days of my startup. So my startup — which is now, you know, we're now talking about roughly ten years ago.

At this point in time my startup was beginning to really activate. We were activating some channels, and these were fairly route-one channels — paid search, etcetera — but they were beginning to work and we were beginning to get some real traction and product-market fit.

And I remember reading this article on LinkedIn by somebody and it was talking about the theory of category creation. For those that don't know, the theory is basically you need to create a category and then become the category king. And actually there's a growing body of evidence that says the dominance of the category king is getting bigger over time.

So for example Salesforce — which we all probably know and some love and some don't love — created a category of online CRM and they came to dominate it. But this happens again and again and again. But they created the category — that's the point.

So I was so fascinated by this I did something I've never done in my career before or since. I actually reached out to the consultant who had written this thing and said I'd want you to advise our business.

So this guy comes in and he did a workshop with us, spent a few hours with us, really interesting, got a lot out of it, and he said right I'll come back in a couple of weeks.

He came back a couple of weeks later and said, look Conrad, I'm doing myself out of a job here, but you don't need me.

An honest consultant — fantastic.

He said look I've spoken to your management team, they've got a really clear strategy, they understand what they're doing, I don't think I'm going to add a huge amount of value. You don't need me. You need a brand consultant because you're just effing boring.

He said I was thinking about your business in the car the other day — I think about you guys far more than I should do given how they repay me — and I couldn't even remember the name of your company. You need a brand consultant. You don't need me.

So yeah, that was kind of someone just playing it right in your face — this is a problem.

And up until that point I'd been very conservative around brand. The name of the business was Funding Options and it does what it says on the tin.

But there was one player in our category — they weren't actually a competitor but they were in the same category of business lending — that was just blowing everyone out of the water, raising tons of money. And I actually hunted down the brand agency they'd used and reached out to them because I thought, well, that's probably the number one clue as to who I should speak to.

And they basically lectured me on how brand, even in B2B, is about personality and emotion. And actually the founder of that agency just said to me:

Look Conrad, there are a hundred agencies in London — some of the best marketing agencies in the world in London. A hundred agencies can do this. My experience is that whether or not this succeeds comes down to how brave you are, because we're going to push you to be brave.

Because if you don't do something memorable then you might as well just burn money on a bonfire.

And that was part of my mental journey — if you're going to bother putting any money into brand, you've got to be distinctive and memorable and you're going to have to take some risks.

And actually there's a huge amount of evidence that suggests B2B businesses buy on emotion and justify on fact.

You can go to ninety-five percent of B2B websites and they're really boring. They're talking about features and functions and using industry jargon. That is not the basis on which people are going to buy your products. They're going to buy your product because they get emotionally connected to it — because they're human beings.

I think there's been a lot of research done by LinkedIn B2B on this, working with Les Binet and Peter Field, that have looked into this and have got the evidence for anyone that's interested in going to find the data.

It's just quite extraordinary. Despite the fact that this is empirically proven, people still write these horrible functional websites in industry jargon.

My pet hate is the word empowered. Never use a word on your website that you wouldn't use in the pub. Do you say empower in the pub? I hope you don't. I don't know if you do.

Don't want to go to the —

Unless that's a pint of tasty bitter, probably not.

Exactly.

So basically that forced me out of my corporate comfort zone and into the realisation that if I was a challenger I either do no brand or I do it bravely and take some risks.

And actually we followed that through with Allica because of our brand identity. We're really working on it at the moment by the way, but our brand icon is an orange bowler hat.

Now in Britain a bowler hat is an iconic banker symbol, but ours is an orange bowler hat, and our tagline is “how business banking used to be — just better.”

And actually it's quite interesting — you can put the orange bowler hat in front of a customer, a target customer, and they'll be like, I get it. You're a fresh version of what used to be there.

Which is a very powerful subliminal retrieval cue.

When you were telling the story it made me think of my dad's business. He used to have a bank manager in his town. My dad used to run a carpet business and he'd go down and have a relationship with the bank manager. He went on holiday with his bank manager. He ended up buying a house from his bank manager. The bank manager is now in his nineties and my dad still has a relationship with him as a mate.

And that is how it used to be back in the day.

So it's —

Well that's number two: relationship.

Yeah. I really lock into what you're saying there and I think I understand now — business banking how it used to be. It's just better.

Because of the digital business.

Yes, of course.

So when your consultant said to you “I'm going to do myself out of a job, you need this” — what was your reaction? Did you know in your gut then that what he was saying was truthful?

No. I mean, speaking honestly, one of the things I've learned about myself is I react very badly on day one to ideas that aren't my own.

If one of my team comes to me with an idea that's different to what I had in my mind, these days I'll keep a poker face, sleep on it, and often leave it a week or so.

For example we're doing a refresh on our brand identity at the moment. Conceptually we'd agreed what we were going to do, but the rendering is different.

When I first saw it I did my poker face — it wouldn't have been a poker face ten years ago — and said I'm going to sleep on this one.

And I now realise having reflected on it that it's much better than my idea.

So no — that was the straight answer. But I was mature enough to sleep on it.

And then we started talking about the power of a brand — a good brand that actually starts to work hard for you. Presumably you would agree that the brand has had a role to play in the extraordinary growth the bank is now going through.

Yeah. Look, brand is a relatively recent investment for Allica because, coming back to disciplined execution, brand is a slow burn. It's a flywheel.

One of the things I'm most proud of with marketing — and how we as a marketing function worked in the early days — is that we had very little money to play with.

Rather than do a bit of brand, a bit of this, a bit of that, we decided to marshal all of our limited resources and focus on two things we thought we could win with limited resources.

One was channel branding. I talked about brokers — a small, connected community. We thought we could focus our resources there and win in that one little tunnel.

How did you do that?

LinkedIn turned out to be a superpower there. And there are quite a lot of conferences that go on in that segment and we always nail conferences. I think we always have the best-in-show at conferences.

And then the other was employer branding.

Maybe that's a strange one, but I had a marketing budget and I decided to focus it on marketing us to potential talent. Because I'd learned building businesses that in the end you win the talent battle or you lose the war.

So I thought: how do we become an attractive place to come and work? Back then no one had heard of us. We were deluded about our employer brand.

These days the best people want to work at Allica because of our success.

Most companies do outbound marketing for talent — they try to find people. If you build an employer brand it becomes inbound marketing. People want to join your company.

So I decided that with our limited resources we wouldn't spend on customer acquisition — we'd spend on talent acquisition.

Brand spend aimed at customers only really started just over a year ago. Brand recognition in our target segment has more than doubled this year already.

And increasingly you see it in conversion rates — nothing else changes but people convert more. That means something out there is working on your behalf.

Well you used the phrase flywheel, right? Brand is one of those things where it's very hard to get started, but once the momentum builds it keeps going.

There's an amazing book called Good to Great by Jim Collins. It sounds like a rah-rah American business book but it's actually very data-driven. One of the ideas in it is the flywheel — lots of small pushes that gradually create unstoppable momentum.

Amazon is the most famous example. Jeff Bezos famously sketched their flywheel on a napkin after discussing the idea with Jim Collins.

Fantastic.

Is this something you talk about with the team?

Yes, but communication depends on the audience. With investors we talk about flywheels and strategy. With the whole company I use analogies — supertankers and speedboats and things like that.

Communication for your audience is a superpower.

What's next for you individually?

The big open question for Allica is whether we go international. It's genuinely an open question. If we did, I’d probably play a role in that.

But honestly we're just getting started in the UK. We're still under one percent market share in terms of deep customer relationships.

So there's plenty to do here.

And scaling up is exciting. You're not in the constant crisis of startup life, but you're not in the stagnation of a huge corporate either.

You're in that sweet spot.

Just closing thoughts — you've gone from being a lone founder to part of a team. Some people might think you'd struggle with not being the final decision-maker. But it sounds like you're delighted about that.

Yeah — absolutely. When I was interviewed by the board they kept asking me if I'd thought hard about not being my own boss anymore.

The reality is I'd had a whole year walking the dog thinking about that very question.

There's an Irish expression: if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.

My previous company was something I'm very proud of — almost a hundred employees, about a billion pounds funded to UK small businesses. But it wasn't a company that was going to change the world.

Allica might be.

The SMEs we support really matter. If you take the established SMEs out of a town, the town dies.

So fixing banking for those businesses really matters.

And that's why I'm still incredibly excited about the journey.

Fantastic. Thank you, Conrad, so much for coming down today and chatting to us. I wish you and Allica all the success — and hopefully fastest-growing business in 2025 and 2026 as well.

Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you.

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