Allica Bank completes £500m of asset finance lending

Allica Bank – the business bank dedicated to serving established businesses – has revealed it has lent over £500m in asset finance.

Having launched its asset finance arm in January 2021, Allica says over the past 12 months it has lent almost double the amount it lent in the previous two years combined.

This comes following the bank recently revealing that it achieved it’s first full year of profitability in 2023, and that it has now lent a total of over £2bn to established businesses, with the majority of its other lending being in commercial mortgages. Last year it also launched a new growth finance product, designed specifically to provide flexible finance for growing businesses.

Allica is now seeing an average of over 750 applications for asset finance each month, up from 450 in 2022. It says the jump in applications is down to being able to deliver consistent and fast decisions to brokers thanks to a mix of its technology and people.

In 2023, Allica expanded its business development manager team by 40% and grew its sales support team to 19 people. While its auto-decisioning system means its team can spend more of their time on added value rather than admin.

The bank has also seen growth thanks to the expansion of its product offering to include soft and medium assets, for which it has already seen nearly £50m of applications. It has also been a notable proponent of the Recovery Loan Scheme, which has allowed it support applications that would otherwise sit outside its credit appetite.

Allica Bank’s head of asset finance sales, Brandon Hall, said: “Allica has built a reputation among brokers for fast and consistent decision-making, supported by top-class customer service. You can see this in our broker satisfaction surveys, in which 89% rate our service as good or excellent.

“The whole Allica team is incredibly grateful to our broker community for their support and feedback, without which we would never have reached this milestone. We are looking forward to working closely with them as we build out our proposition even further. By continuing this partnership, I am sure we’ll soon be celebrating £1 billion of asset finance lent to help established businesses achieve their goals.”