UK challenger bank creates connected, personalized experiences for small and medium businesses 2x faster with reusable APIs

MuleSoft, provider of the world’s #1 integration and API platform, today announced that Allica Bank is deploying MuleSoft to deliver a connected, personalized banking experience for small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which account for three-fifths of employment in the entire UK private sector. With a focus on established SMEs (5-100 employees), Allica is on a mission to empower these businesses to succeed. Allica Bank combined relationship banking with modern digital banking experiences to launch a new digital bank from scratch in under 12 months – two times faster than any of its competitors. By unlocking and integrating data across systems and applications, MuleSoft is helping Allica Bank gain a single view of its customers and provide SMEs with a straightforward and streamlined banking experience.

“The established SME community in the UK is profoundly underserved when it comes to banking,” said Simon Bateman, CIO, Allica Bank. “At Allica, we’re giving these SMEs access to the modern, straightforward digital banking tools many have come to expect from their consumer bank. And then we’re backing this up with the tailored and local advice that we know they both want and need.”

“To have been able to build a bank capable of this in 12 months is staggering. MuleSoft has been a vital partner to us on this journey, playing a central role as we develop a modern bank with integration at the heart.”

Reimagining the digital banking experience

According to the Connectivity Benchmark Report 2020, less than half of IT leaders in the financial services industry say they are able to provide a completely connected experience. As a result of disconnected experiences, 51% of global consumers would consider changing their bank. Allica Bank addressed this challenge by putting their customers at the center of every interaction. The bank created highly differentiated experiences, such as delivering personalized services based on customer profiles and enabling customers to self-serve and manage finances on their own time.

To quickly create these seamless and new customer experiences, Allica Bank engaged MuleSoft professional services and consulting partner, Whishworks, to implement MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform™. Whishworks built more than 300 APIs on Anypoint Platform, enabling Allica Bank to unlock and unify data across disparate systems, such as customer databases, document management systems, and business process management systems. By creating reusable building blocks as APIs, Allica Bank is able to rapidly compose new business capabilities in days or weeks instead of taking months to build from scratch with custom code. With this speed and agility, Allica Bank built its digital bank two times faster than its competitors and was granted its UK banking license in September 2019.

“Much of our success comes from our ability to work with partners who enable us to build quickly and add new capabilities on the fly,” said Bateman. “MuleSoft has been critical to our business strategy to collaborate with an ecosystem of partners and create new revenue channels, fast.”

Building a foundation for speed 

With MuleSoft, Allica Bank plans to expand into new distribution channels and scale by continuing to work with third-party suppliers and partners to extend its suite of financial services products. For example, Allica Bank has been able to provide a true omnichannel digital banking experience by working with banking technology partners, including Profile Software to support its savings accounts and commercial mortgage lending and Netsol to introduce asset finance for customers.

As a composable enterprise, Allica Bank can easily unlock its backend systems and connect them with trusted third-party suppliers to develop a range of other new customer-facing services. With easily discoverable APIs and integrations, the bank is empowering an ecosystem of internal and external developers to deliver more value for customers with speed, agility and innovation.

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