Conrad Ford, Chief Customer Officer at Allica Bank, joins Adclear's 'Between the Guidelines' to talk about the gap in UK business banking that nobody's filling - and what it actually takes to build a bank from scratch to fix it.
Conrad didn't set out to be a founder. He "stumbled out of university," spent his 20s travelling, and only got into finance in his late 20s at the urging of an aunt who told him to get a qualification. Ten years in investment banking and corporate strategy later, he founded Funding Options in 2012 - one of the original Silicon Roundabout fintechs - building an aggregator for SME lending after the financial crisis collapsed the market.
He exited in 2019, just before COVID, and was eventually pulled into Allica by CEO Richard Davies. Allica's thesis: established SMEs (roughly a third of the economy) are systematically underserved. They're too complex for mass-market retail banking and too low-value for traditional corporate banking - so a bank built specifically for them, combining digital self-service with real relationship managers at the "moments of truth," can grow fast. It has.
Conrad and the team also cover the story behind Allica's orange bowler hat brand, the "I Like A Bank" tube campaign he initially hated, how to think about compliance as a funnel rather than a binary, and the questions first-time founders should be able to answer before they start.
Once you're booked in, we'll send you a free playbook on Financial promotions compliance for FinTechs.
