Building a complex current account
The Client
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.
The challenge
Allica wanted to launch their first transactional banking product for established SMEs, and were looking to leverage a modern cloud-native core banking system. As such, they needed a flexible and cutting-edge ledger provider, who could support their objective of rebuilding SME banking from the ground up, rather than just replicating what already existed.
Why SaaScada
Allica Bank selected SaaScada because of its unique intelligent banking platform that provides new entrants with flexibility as they scale and grow. The data-rich SaaScada platform empowers Allica Bank with the ability to deliver products tailored to its customers’ needs based on their real time transaction activity.
The solution
The proposal was to launch a business current account aimed at SME clients and use SaaScada as the core banking engine to empower Allica’s internal engineering team. SaaScada abstracts away the complexity of integrating multiple vendors into a central set of account ledgers that can be used to deliver a wide range of current account capabilities. The SaaScada integration framework was used to quickly develop integrations to ClearBank and Thredd for agency banking and card payments respectively with SaaScada running balances and acting as the central point of record for accounts, transactions and product configuration.
The SaaScada UX API was integrated with Allica’s internal single customer view solution, allowing seamless and compliant customer onboarding and account opening process. The UX API was also integrated with Allica’s identity provider, combining the power of SaaScada’s authorisation/access permission framework with authentication services provided by Ping.
Working together
SaaScada’s agile software engineering methodology fit perfectly into the iterative sprint-based approach taken by Allica’s internal engineering teams. The SaaScada and Allica teams worked towards a clear set of project objectives and goals with requirements analysed on a just-in-time basis using Jira. This approach enabled both teams to maximise productivity, reduce re-work and adapt the solution based on challenges that emerged as part of the initial build phase.
One of the features provided by the Allica SME current account is cashback rewards paid on card purchases. In order to deliver the specific requirements of the rewards program, SaaScada tapped into the event streaming capability of the SaaScada transaction processor to develop a set of custom data views that could be used to inform cashback reward calculation/posting routines and the ability for customers to view their current month’s expected cashback position.
The Proof
Less than 12 months after launch of the Business Current Account, Allica Bank had opened more than 2000 accounts, with billions of pounds worth of transactions processed.
Following successful delivery of the current account, Allica has now also built fixed term deposit and instant access savings products. The SaaScada team has continued to work closely with the Allica team to build new features for their savings products range.
