Case Study

Established in 2019, Allica Bank is a leading fintech challenger bank, named by The Times newspaper as one of the UK’s Top 20 financial technology (fintech) companies. Allica Bank is dedicated to providing a full range of credit and payment services to established, growing SMEs – combining proprietary technology and experienced local relationship managers to provide great customer experience. Allica Bank saw strong growth in 2021, announcing a £110m funding round and portfolio acquisition of circa 2000 of AIB’s GB customers.

Allica wanted to launch their first transactional banking product for established SMEs, and were looking to leverage a modern cloud based 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.

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.

One of these innovative products is a business payment current account with unique features that will support Allica Bank’s strategy in addressing the needs of the SME market.

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 GPS 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 to Allica’s identity provider, combining the power of SaaScada’s authorisation/access permission framework with authentication services provided by Ping.

Following successful delivery of the current account, Allica can also now build fixed term deposit and instant access savings products directly within the SaaScada Portal. This enables expansion of products for which Allica can use SaaScada, and positions SaaScada as a key core banking partner building on the existing current account foundations for single customer view, onboarding, authentication, authorisation and end user experience.

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 months expected cashback position.

Working alongside Saascada has been a fantastic customer experience – the team is knowledgeable, creative and delivery focused. They are always available to discuss a new problem or challenge, thinking innovatively about how to tackle it together and are easily able to move at our fast pace to deliver products to customers swiftly. We have partnered on a number of key initiatives over the course of our product build, enabling us to build our first transactional product and launch it to beta in just 9 months.

Keshvi Radia, Head of Product – Payments, Allica Bank

One of the notable features of working with SaaScada is the speed and agility of the Saascada team in building the new features we need. Our engineers are delighted that they are never waiting for SaaScada.

Toby Mason, COO, Allica Bank