Our continued commitment to Gender Equity

Allica Bank has remained steadfast in our commitment to empowering women and supporting their progression within the financial services sector. We reaffirmed this through joining the Women in Finance Charter in 2022.

The Charter, initiated by HM Treasury in 2016 in response to Dame Jayne-Anne Gadhia’s review, called on firms to assess the inclusion of women at board level, and focuses on retaining and supporting talent below the C-suite.

Joining the Charter encourages firms to strive for a more equitable workforce, by setting their own targets and enabling them to review and report on their obligation to provide women with a fair place to work.

Striving for equity

Allica set itself two targets for 2024:

• to have overall female representation of 44% across our staff by the end of the year.  
• to have 35% of women in senior management positions by March 2024.

In 2024, we increased the number of women in a position of senior management, as well as the number of women in our workforce. But our rapid company growth has meant that we fell short of our overall target. In 2024, Allica expanded by 35% and employed over 680 people, with 42% of women making up our workforce, and 31% of women sitting in positions of senior management.

What have we done?

Our commitment to lifting women up in the workforce has enabled us to develop policies that enhance women’s working lives.

We’ve introduced a Menopause Policy to ensure that women at any age are supported at work. Especially as they navigate new changes. Whether this be a time of empowerment, or a time of challenge. We’ve delivered company-wide sessions to ensure that all colleagues are equipped with the tools to support one another, regardless of gender.

Implementing a Talent Review and Succession Planning Framework has ensured that not only do we attract talented women, but we identify and support their development at every stage of their career with us. As well as acquiring new recruitment systems that helps to remove unconscious bias in the hiring process and training our colleagues on recognising unconscious bias in the workplace.

We’ve increased our focus on our Diversity & Inclusion Squad. Championing them by platforming their work at leadership events, increasing our budget for events and activities, and ensuring that diversity and inclusion are a core part of our business.

In 2024, we promoted 12% of women, or expanded their roles, leading to better career development.

Although numbers only tell one part of the story, our colleagues are the real voice behind what we do at Allica. Our ethos doesn’t only sit with aiming to be the most recommended bank by SMEs. We also strive to be the most recommended employer with our colleagues.

We’re delighted to report that internal surveys revealed that 92% of our colleagues reported that they enjoy working at Allica. And 92% also agreed or strongly agreed that our company is demographically diverse.

Reinforcing our commitment – our targets for 2025

We’re proud of the growth we’ve achieved over the last year. And we’ve once again set ourselves strong targets as we continue to develop and expand our workforce in 2025.

Our new targets are:

• to have overall female representation of 45% across our staff by the end of 2026.
• to have 35% of women in senior management positions by end of 2026.

And despite not achieving all we wanted to in 2025, we’re delighted to report that women still make up 40% of our Executive Committee.

During our commitment to increasing the number of women in positions of senior management, Allica doubled in size, meaning we had to reflect on how we define these particular roles. We’ve since narrowed our population of employees within this category, which has enabled us to become more focussed both on how we hire, as well as enabling us to gain a better understanding of who currently sits within them.

We were able to identify a number of roles at this level, which have significant influence on our vision, as well as our overall strategy, delivery and objectives.

Where to next?

We’ll continue to ensure that we support women through every part of their career at Allica. As well as breaking down the doors of the finance industry.

We are continuing to expand our workforce and ensuring that the targets we’ve set underpin our strategic goals as we surge ahead.

As we look to the future, we’re bringing the learnings from the last 12 months into focus, whilst acknowledging that we didn’t quite meet our targets last year. And although our unprecedented growth played a role in this, it highlighted areas where we can still improve.

With that in mind, we’ll keep striving to retain, promote and recruit a diverse workforce that is proud to be part of Allica.