Record results as number of SMEs choosing Allica more than doubles
Allica today reports its best ever financial results, as the leading digital bank for established SMEs marked another year of significant growth and deepening customer relationships in 2025, in its third consecutive year of profit.
Highlights
- Underlying pre-tax profit increased 34% to £43.7m (£32.5m FY24) even with
- £30m of strategic investment in new products and go to market
- Gross profit after risk up 32% to £145.3m (£110.2m FY24)
- Gross revenue up 27% to £371.3m (£293.1m FY24)
- Active Business Reward Account customers up 133% to over 14,000 (>6,000 FY24)
- Total lending up 23% reaching £3.7bn (£3.0bn FY24) – with growth across all core lending products
- Customer deposits up 29% to £5.7bn (£4.4bn FY23)
In a year of deep strategic investment, Allica accelerated the development of its proprietary technology into a genuinely AI-enabled tech platform with the capability to revolutionise lending opportunities for established SMEs, augment the relationship manager model and deliver substantial speed and cost advantages.
As agentic AI starts to reshape financial services, Allica’s position as the UK’s only full-service digital bank for established SMEs will become increasingly powerful. Allica is already deploying AI agents across its proprietary technology and data to deliver a step-change in its SME lending proposition – driving faster, sharper lending decisions, and giving relationship managers better insight in every customer conversation.
With the successful completion of its recent $155m Series D fundraise, the fintech is well on track for 10% UK market penetration by 2028 and is actively considering international expansion.
Richard Davies, Allica CEO said: “2025 was our strongest year yet. In a year when we’ve been investing deeply in tech and proposition enhancements, we’ve delivered a 34% increase in underlying pre-tax profit – and the number of established SMEs choosing to make Allica their primary bank has more than doubled, showing the demand for our full-service established SME model.
“But the more significant story is what’s happening beneath the numbers. Because we’ve been building Allica from the ground up on powerful, proprietary technology – with modern clean data architecture and a unified software stack – we’re entering this new era of agentic AI with a structural advantage that legacy banks and others relying on third-party systems simply cannot close.
“Our engineering teams are now developing and deploying AI agents and tools across the full technology stack, and we’re developing what we believe will be a global first for complex SME lending using AI agents built on our own proprietary data.
“Allica is building the category defining digital bank for established SMEs – a segment who make up a third of the economy but are drastically underserved. With our tech advantage now being amplified by the power of AI, the opportunity for us to transform the established SME banking market in in the UK and overseas is bigger than ever.”
Customer highlights
- Named the Most Recommended Business Bank for established SMEs (March 2026)
- Active Business Rewards Account (BRA) customers more than doubled to >14,000, up 133% (>6,000 FY24)
- BRA features further enhanced with delivery of an upgraded overdraft product, integrations with QuickBooks, Apple Pay & Google Pay, and expense cards
- Allica brand awareness doubled again in the past 12 months to 16% – up from 8% in FY24 and 4% in FY23 – according to specialist market research agency Brandspeak
- Customer penetration of the established SME segment has now reached over 6%, well on track to achieve the bank’s 10% market penetration target by 2028
- Advanced over £1.3bn in new lending to established SMEs across all core lending streams, the second consecutive year of over £1bn in new annual lending:
- Commercial Mortgages up 35% to £2.4bn (£1.7bn FY24)
- Asset Finance up 19% to £507m (£428m FY24)
- Growth Finance up 127% to £171m (£75m FY24)
- Bridging Finance up 85% to £121m (£65.4m FY24)
- Launched a market first “Bridge-to-Term” lending product, strengthening Allica’s bridging finance offer and driving further synergies with other commercial property lending
- An excellent primary banking customer NPS of +76, representing a further increase from previous ratings (+67 in November 24); among partners, an accountant NPS of +79 and a broker NPS of +52
- Named Bank of the Year (CityAM Awards) and ‘Best Business Finance Provider’ for fourth year running at the British Bank Awards
Winning in the age of AI
Allica has accelerated its investment in AI-driven innovation throughout 2025, with the deployment of AI tools and agents expanding rapidly across the business, and development commenced on a revolutionary new approach to complex SME lending using proprietary AI agents built on Allica’s proprietary software and data:
2025 represented a critical year of acceleration, and the emerging results of Allica’s AI deployment underline the significant tech advantages:
- Rapid acceleration of AI use by our AI product and engineering teams – enabling over 3,700 releases in year (with high >99.5% up time) and a doubling in successful ‘merged pull requests’ for software development in Q4-25 vs H1-25
- AI engineering capabilities placed in top decile of companies in major industry benchmarking study, with AI engineering tooling and autonomous developer agent usages soaring in 2025, with industry-leading 93.9% weekly active usage (effectively 100% as the delta is holidays) in engineering teams
- Rebuild of design system to optimise for AI native tools – already delivering a c90% reduction in page build times
Organisation-wide regular use of AI tools has risen from c50% to over 80% through 2025
Year of continued strategic development and acceleration in the UK
- Entered embedded finance market with acquisition of Kriya – a leading SME credit and payments fintech with an exciting embedded business PayLater solution – with aim to deliver £1bn of additional SME working capital finance by end of 2028
- Expanded the relationship manager network, nearly tripling to 60 people in existing and new locations, including Bristol, Cambridgeshire and Scotland
- Featured in Deloitte’s UK Technology Fast 50 for third year running and ranked second in the Financial Times’ FT1000 – a ranking of Europe’s fastest growing companies of any sector
Outlook
Allica’s 2025 performance supported the successful completion of the bank’s $155m Series D funding round in February 2026, which will drive the bank’s UK growth, AI tech investment and first stage of international expansion.
The fintech’s continued drive to increase customer growth, especially around the Business Reward Account, will be further supported by a new brand campaign – including a new TV creative – featuring the signature orange bowler hat, which will launch in mid-April of 2026.