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Sunday, May 17, 2026
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Allica Bank’s Conrad Ford On The Change In Customer Needs Since The Pandemic

Conrad Ford, Chief Product & Strategy Officer at Allica Bank sits down with FF News’ Ali Paterson to discuss the ways in which the needs of the SME market have been changed since the covid-19 pandemic.

“In The UK, it’s quite hard to overstate how much of an impact [the pandemic] had on the SME lending market. In one year, you had around 10 or even 20 years’ worth of lending volume to SMEs through the many government guarantee schemes that were rolled out and you would have seen that in America and other territories as well. They were different types of schemes, but the same common theme so you had enormous volumes and a huge operational spike.”

“Many of the incumbent banks suddenly had to be able to deal with the fact that they had spent 20 years frankly not digitalizing and a world where they had to get customers to e-signature. They had to learn to serve customers without branches, without physical documents and without meeting the client.”

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