When Richard Davies arrived at Allica Bank in July 2020, he has said, the bank had made a couple of loans. That was it. A full banking licence, which takes most founders years of regulatory pain to win, and almost nothing behind the door.
Davies had just left Revolut, where he was chief operating officer, and before that he had been the first CEO of OakNorth, where he helped shape the business model and licence application. Moving from the most famous consumer fintech in Europe to a quiet licensed shell looked, from the outside, like a step down.
Davies chose the narrow target: established small and medium-sized firms.
But the licence was the prize. Allica had received its PRA banking licence in 2019. Some profiles say the company began life years earlier under a different name, CivilisedBank, though that detail is thinly sourced. What mattered was that someone had cleared the regulatory hurdle, and that nobody had yet built a business on top of it.
Davies chose the narrow target: established small and medium-sized firms. Not startups, not sole traders, but companies a bank branch used to know. Sept 2020 brought £26m led by Warwick Capital Partners. In November 2021, Allica announced the purchase of Allied Irish Banks' British SME book, about £600m in loans to roughly 2,000 customers, completed in August 2022. A bank that had made a couple of loans now had a book of lending.
More money followed: £110m in 2021, £55m and £100m in 2022 with TCV joining. The business current account arrived in January 2023, and by year end had about 2,000 customers.
Then the rankings began to arrive: the UK's fastest-growing fintech in Deloitte's Fast 50 in 2023, the fastest-growing private company in The Sunday Times 100 in 2024. In 2025 it reported revenue of £371.3m and net income of £36.9m, with over 30,000 business customers by early 2026, when a $155m round made it a unicorn at $1.2bn.
The quiet closing lesson: a licence is not a company. Davies took the boring, regulated, unglamorous asset that others had walked past, and spent the five years proving that the first loan matters less than the second thousandth.