When the coronavirus pandemic forced UK businesses and public services into a series of lockdowns over the past year, digital technologies in the cloud enabled organisations to continue operating. Raconteur spoke to Jason Oakley about Recognise Bank’s experience of using the cloud.
Recognise Bank launched in November in the middle of the pandemic, a bold move driven by the “chronic under-serving of the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) community”. So says Jason Oakley, founder and chief executive of Recognise and former head of commercial banking at Metro Bank.
His proposition is relationship-led banking that’s digitally enabled. Making the launch possible during the pandemic restrictions was nCino cloud technology.
Recognise Bank was licensed in November, but has already learnt lessons when it comes to delivering on its proposition of trusted adviser. “A pandemic changes the way you onboard clients; we’ve developed virtual onboarding over Teams or Zoom,” says Oakley.
Recognise has also changed the way it instructs valuers and lawyers to fast-track loans and streamline esignatures. “It’s about convenience and touchless, remote trading, and the cloud caters to that,” he says. “It motivates me to harness cloud technology to improve user experience for the SME.”
Cloud technology speeds up products that cater to customers’ changing needs. And, with the vaccination programme going well, businesses need a route out of the pandemic and that means access to working capital. “They have to rejuvenate and get going,” says Oakley.
This article originally appeared in Raconteur on 18 March 2021.
