Allica Bank Acquires Kriya to Enter Embedded Finance Market

U.K. bank and FinTech Allica Bank has acquired small and mid-sized business (SMB) lending FinTech Kriya.

With Kriya’s embedded business PayLater solution, Allica will enter the embedded finance market, the bank said in a Wednesday (Oct. 22) press release.

The combined offering created by the acquisition will provide flexible working capital and PayLater options to SMBs, according to the release. Allica aims to advance £1 billion (about $1.3 billion) of working capital finance to SMBs over the next three years, the release said.

Kriya will continue to operate under its own brand, CEO and Co-Founder Anil Stocker will continue to lead the business, and all Kriya employees will join Allica, per the release.

Allica Bank CEO Richard Davies said in the release that Allica aims to serve British SMBs that often struggle to access flexible finance.

“Kriya has built an impressive business over more than a decade, and Anil and his team share our belief that [SMB] finance needs reinventing, and that together we can offer something the market desperately needs,” Davies said.

In its own blog post about the acquisition, Kriya said it will now be able to offer more funding to more businesses, provide both short- and long-term funding, develop new lending and payment products, and expand across Europe.

“By joining Allica, Kriya combines FinTech agility with a bank’s scalability and reach — delivering the end-to-end working capital products businesses have long needed,” Kriya said in the post.

When Allica secured its banking license by the U.K.’s Prudential Regulation Authority in September 2019, the company said described itself as a “bespoke bank for [SMBs]” targeting these businesses with cash management and working capital tools including loans, payment services, asset finance products and savings solutions.

In April, Allica Bank said that in 2024, it grew its loan book to over £3 billion (about $4 billion) and customer deposits to over £4 billion (about $5.3 billion).

“The pace of Allica’s growth underlines the digital bank’s potential to disrupt the [SMB] finance market,” the company said at the time in an announcement. “Its innovative proprietary technology has been built specifically to serve established [SMBs] — those businesses typically with 5-250 staff — who make up a third of the U.K.’s economy.”