Here's a weird origin story: in 2020, Richard Davies took over as CEO of a bank whose founder had already left. No product-market fit, no real customer base, just a banking licence and £5 million out the door in loans. Basically a blank slate with a bank charter attached.
Six years later, that bank — Allica — has lent over £3.7 billion, hit three straight profitable years, and been named the UK's fastest-growing tech company by Deloitte two years running. The interesting part isn't the growth numbers though. It's how they got there, and it's got some real lessons for anyone building product.
He'd seen the same problem from three angles
Davies didn't come up as a typical bank exec. Strategy consulting first, then almost a decade at Barclays working with SMEs. In 2013 he became the founding CEO of OakNorth, another SME-focused challenger bank. Then Revolut, where he built out their banking product across Ireland, the US, Australia, and Singapore.
So by the time he got to Allica, he'd watched the same underserved-SME problem play out inside a legacy bank, a specialist challenger, and a fast-scaling consumer fintech. That's basically 20 years of user research before writing a line of product spec.
