Painting a better customer journey for SMEs

When Ravneet Shah graduated from university with a degree in maths and computer science, she was told she had picked the wrong profession. “It’s because I was always painting and into the arts,” she says. However, instead of setting off on a journey that would have seen her teaching or spending her days in an artist’s studio, Ms Shah took her degree and embarked on a career in software engineering that took her to Santander UK, Lombard Risk and now to the post of chief technical officer (CTO) at UK lender Allica Bank. 

Allica Bank is a UK challenger bank that is forging its way in a very challenging sector – established small and medium-sized business (SMEs) – which have been traditionally underserved by incumbent banks and have until recently not seen much activity from the fintech community. 

“Allica Bank is on a mission to empower established SMEs with a range of products they need, and we are doing that both with digital as well as relationship banking,” says Ms Shah. “Digital comes under my remit.”

Account opener

Top of the order of business for the newly appointed CTO is migrating the £600m SME loan portfolio the bank acquired from Allied Irish Banks late last year. Ms Shah’s team is also developing a business rewards account which Allica Bank plans on launching later on this year. “We’ve had a couple of teams working relentlessly over [the account] for a year and a half now, and it is almost up and running,” she adds. 

As an overall strategy, the bank is trying to serve as a hub that will provide a one-stop shop to meet the needs of UK SMEs. “The big banks and the new banks, they’re focusing on either corporates or micro organisations,” says Ms Shah. “SMEs have very simple needs. Mainly it’s loans and cashflow. They don’t have a specific bank or the organisation to go and get the products that they need; they have to go to multiple places and we are trying to build a service hub for them.”

Ms Shah joined Allica at the start of 2020 as lead integration engineer, right after the bank successfully gained a banking licence. One of the first projects she worked on was leading the development and successful delivery of Allica’s online banking portal. She also led the team moving the bank’s architecture to microservices and micro-frontends, an approach that uses lots of smaller, independent services that talk to each other and form part of a larger application architecture. 

Ms Shah was soon promoted to vice-president of engineering in May 2021, where she led the engineering team and technical architecture across web, mobile, back-end engineering, data and testing, as well as the platforms teams. 

While leading the technical team and evaluating how to create digital journeys to better serve their customers, Ms Shah is driven by the knowledge that the business of Allica Bank is banking. 

“I have been on a journey where, as an engineer, I was always thinking: technology first, how can we use the best practices, the cleanest code,” she says. “But now at this position, I’m thinking: no, the customer is first, the product comes second and then we need to go back and see how we can use the most modern technology and the tools correctly and rightly for those customers.”

The next challenge

Ms Shah’s banking journey started at Santander Bank in the UK as a retail banking engineer and then a business banking engineer. At Allica Bank she was introduced to the commercial mortgage market and became fascinated by the lifecycle of the loans and how the bank served their customers. 

“That’s quite interesting and challenging because of the origination, the servicing, the refinancing. It’s a quite broad range of the product,” she says. “That’s something I’m passionate about. So how we can actually improve the process and serve the customer quickly and efficiently and get the data out of it to make some more interesting analytics out of it. That’s what I’m really passionate about.”

Despite earning most of her experience in financial services, Ms Shah started her career developing code to record temperature readings. Much like the weather, the core tenet of innovation for Ms Shah is change. “Times are changing, obviously. If we go 10 years back, the life that we were living was totally different,” she says. “We innovate, we’re thinking out of the box, and I think it’s quite vital. I personally believe that sometimes you have to go and challenge why we are doing certain things and come up with new ideas.”