The 'orange hat bank'

You might have seen our very first brand campaign on TV recently, featuring the Allica money hat (AKA our beautiful orange bowler hat). 

The money hat came from the idea that when you’re running a business, you have to wear many hats. When looking after the company finances, you'd 'put your money hat on' (so to speak).  It’s a metaphor but then we started to wonder, if we were to imagine one, what would a 'money hat' look like?  

Because we're a bank, there was really only one choice.  

The only hat that fits

The bowler hat was the head covering of choice for the old-school bankers of yore and came to signify that the wearer worked in finance. The bowler has long been associated with the City of London (the UK’s financial centre), and the bowler-hatted banker was a familiar character in British culture throughout the 20th Century, most famously depicted by Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army  

Our orange bowler hat symbolises what Allica is all about. Firstly, it’s a nod to the way banking used to be, when business owners knew the name of their bank manager and would meet them face-to-face.  

Those relationships deepened over time, with the bank manager knowledgeable about the businesses the bank was helping to finance, sometimes to the extent that they would know the names of employees and family members.  

It was banking very much rooted in communities, before banking communication became more anonymous and distant, dominated by hold music marathons and chatbots. We believe in relationship banking, so every Allica customer gets a relationship manager that they have details for and can contact whenever they like.  

Pretty smart

Choosing orange as the colour of our bowler also signifies that Allica is a new take on that old style of banking. After all, there’s plenty about the old way of banking we don’t like. With Allica, as well as the relationship banking we feel is so important, we supercharge it with powerful technology, to make dealing with us convenient, fast and intuitive. 

Whether it’s with online banking or through our app, Allica customers can check their balance or make payments whenever it suits them. Digital banking has thankfully freed us all up from the days of Captain Mainwaring, waiting for the bank to open on a Monday morning to do business.  

Allica is also known as a ‘challenger bank’. The orange hat also serves to reflect this: new thinking, bold, designed to fit the needs of established SMEs, and different to the traditional banks. We offer business banking and business loans as you would expect, but also more bespoke finance that doesn’t easily fit into a neat category. Take a look at some of our case studies for examples.  

We’re really happy the orange hat is proving so popular as it’s connecting us to the businesses we’re looking to support with our new take on SME banking. If you’ve only seen us on a billboard or a newspaper ad, you might like to see how Allica suits all kinds of businesses. 

If you’d like to see how Allica can help you, get in touch.