Yapily – Europe’s leading open banking infrastructure platform – has partnered with the UK’s fastest-growing fintech, Allica Bank, to bring the secure and seamless benefits of open banking top-ups to UK SME current accounts.
Having launched to market in 2020, Allica has become the go-to challenger bank for established SMEs with between 5 and 250 employees. It launched its flagship business current account - the Business Rewards Account - in early 2023 to give established SMEs a more rewarding and powerful current account, with the support of a dedicated relationship manager. By leveraging Yapily’s open banking technology, with its extensive business bank coverage across the UK and Europe, Allica Bank is now building on its mission to give established businesses the banking they deserve by enabling them to top-up their accounts even faster.
Instead of manually authorising and transferring funds between apps and accounts, business owners can log into their Allica account, select the amount they wish to top-up, and authorise the payment - all in a few clicks. They can then keep this money for their day-to-day spending in their Allica current account, or transfer it into their instant-access Savings Pot.
Beyond sending money between accounts, the Yapily and Allica Bank partnership also solves the most critical financial challenges facing SMEs. Despite accounting for a third of UK employment and turnover, small businesses are disproportionately impacted by time-consuming and error-prone manual processes, and are significantly underserved by banks.
Misdirected payments, delayed transfers, and logging into multiple platforms create friction and inefficiencies that hold small businesses back. Yapily’s technology, instead, securely initiates payments in real time, ensuring funds are transferred directly without the need for multiple logins or manual steps while providing the highest levels of security and compliance. This feature is the first of Yapily’s open banking solutions to be rolled out to Allica Bank customers, with more to follow in the coming months.
Building on shared momentum
Allica Bank is the latest in a growing number of fintechs, enterprises, and disruptive companies - including Adyen, Alipay, Intuit QuickBooks, Pleo, Zilch and more - trusting Yapily to help them enhance customer experiences, streamline operations, and unlock new revenue streams.
It also follows a strong period of growth for Allica. Since being recognised as the UK’s fastest-growing fintech ever by Deloitte, it was also revealed as the second-fastest growing company in Europe in the Financial Times’ FT1000 list.
Yapily CEO and founder Stefano Vaccino said: “At Yapily, we believe in driving meaningful innovation that makes a difference for businesses and their customers. This partnership allows Allica Bank to bring the speed, simplicity, and security of open banking to their SME customers, empowering them to manage their finances with greater efficiency. We greatly value Allica Bank’s trust in our capabilities and are delighted that they see open banking as a core enhancer of their products. By removing manual processes and reducing errors, we’re not just helping Allica Bank’s customers save time, but allowing them to focus on growing their businesses.”
Allica Bank’s Product Director for Payments, Nida Sattar, added: “Business owners are busy people. It’s why, when it comes to their bank, our focus is on how we can make life easier for our customers, alongside the human support they get from their relationship manager. Being able to easily and quickly top up your account, rather than faffing around with manual payments, is one great example of this. And using open banking in this way provides important security benefits for our customers, too.”
“Yapily has been great to partner with on this. They totally got what we wanted to do, and we’re already exploring how else we can deepen our use of open banking further with our current account and other products.”