Allica is a no-nonsense business bank, built especially for established businesses with between 5 and 250 employees. Their mission is to give businesses the banking they deserve. Allica was recently named as Britain’s fastest-growing private company in 2024’s The Sunday Times 100, and are also the fastest-growing fintech company in the 26-year history of Deloitte’s UK Technology Fast 50 awards. It also revealed in 2023 that it achieved its first full year of profitability.
Allica’s suite of saving accounts were built on legacy technology that required manual processes at multiple stages of the product lifecycle, taking time and resources that could be better utilised adding value for customers. In order to grow their deposit book in a scalable and cost-effective way, it was clear that Allica needed to adopt new technology.
With thousands of existing savings accounts over 3 types of savings products, Allica needed a solution that could deliver the automation, cost savings and product flexibility needed. It was also essential to work with a team that could facilitate a seamless migration of existing accounts, with minimal manual processing and without impact on the end customer.
Having worked with SaaScada on our leading business current account proposition, we were confident they would be able to deliver on a complex migration of other products – and deliver they did!
Nida Sattar, Product Director Transaction Banking, Allica Bank
Having worked together to build the Business Current Account, Allica were aware of the ease and speed with which they would be able to build savings accounts on SaaScada’s platform. SaaScada’s iterative approach to development allowed the teams to work closely together to fast-track the development of new product features and deliver automation for processes that were previously performed manually with the legacy technology. In addition to enabling efficient creation of new products using the Unified Product Hub, SaaScada’s technology would also make it easier to implement changes to existing products.
With a strong track record of collaboration, Allica knew they could work with SaaScada to deliver the phased migration of existing accounts with minimal manual processing.
The Allica and SaaScada teams took an agile approach to developing the new savings products to run alongside the legacy products to allow the onboarding of new customers whilst also preparing for migration of legacy accounts. A key focus was automating previously manual processes to reduce the cost to serve for the product range. All features created for the initial savings account suite were added to the Unified Product Hub to enable simple and intuitive product configuration for the creation of feature-rich products in the future.
With the goal of more efficient product management in mind, automated features were built to reduce manual processing. For example, the Fixed Term deposit feature configuration included:
One feature that has been particularly timesaving for Allica across the range has been the ‘Interest rate source’ functionality, which vastly reduces the time take to respond to changes in the base rate.
The build was completed in under 6 months and allowed Allica Bank to rapidly grow deposits, offering attractive interest rates across their savings products.
Over the last year, the portfolio has grown to over 24,000 accounts. Having built the new features and implemented a range of automation for the initial product range, Allica plans to continue to expand the range to serve new markets and use cases.
Phased migration of savings accounts from legacy technology was completed on schedule and without disruption to customers. Better yet, it was delivered by a small in-house team at Allica working in collaboration with SaaScada. No external consultants or large scale project teams were needed thanks to the simplicity of SaaScada’s architecture.
