Shawbrook Bank is a UK-based specialist lending and savings bank focused on serving SME customers with bespoke commercial lending solutions.
In the competitive world of specialist lending, Shawbrook Bank built its reputation on delivering bespoke, high-touch commercial lending to SME customers. But as the bank scaled, their technology infrastructure couldn't keep pace.
Louise Bird, Commercial Product Officer at Shawbrook Bank, knew the bank needed to evolve. Portfolio managers were tracking complex deals through spreadsheets and SharePoint folders. Credit teams lacked real-time visibility. And most critically, capacity constraints were limiting growth.
"We deal with a lot of complex deals, so they're very high touch," Bird explains. "We really wanted to give the capacity to our portfolio managers in particular so that they could manage more customers."
Build or Buy? Shawbrook Put nCino to the Test
Shawbrook's leadership knew nCino's reputation in SME lending but needed confidence it could deliver on their specific challenges.
"We were really looking to put some structure in and the expertise from nCino, the knowledge of our industry, just made a good partnership for what we were looking for," Bird says. "Mostly around scalability, particularly in that credit management space."
To be certain, Shawbrook conducted a rigorous proof of concept, attempting to replicate nCino's capabilities in-house.
"We attempted to build and see how quickly we could solve some of the problems. But in terms of feature parity, we were just trying to build exactly what nCino was," Bird recalls. "So, we felt it would give us an enhanced speed to market, really focusing on the expertise that nCino would bring from a platform capability, but also a people capability as well."
The verdict: partnering offered faster speed to market and deep industry expertise that would take years to develop internally.
Product by Product: A Replicable Approach to Transformation
In April 2024, Shawbrook kicked off discovery with a deliberate strategy: start with core commercial loans, prove the model, then replicate across other verticals.
The timeline validated the approach. "Our first users onboarded deals going live through the system around the end of February, so 10 months after discovery," Bird shares. "We really focused on our core group of products first, particularly around commercial loans."
The pattern was consistent, with Bird noting: "Focusing on origination and quickly following with portfolio management, we followed that pattern across all of our product verticals - build the product, focus on origination, focus on portfolio management, and then follow with migration.”
From Spreadsheets to Single Source of Truth
nCino delivered immediate benefits. Gone were the days of hunting through SharePoint folders or reconciling multiple spreadsheets.
"For us it's really about having that traceability, the visibility of those deals going through the system," Bird emphasizes. "Before it was all spreadsheets and SharePoint folders. So that's the immediate benefit that we're starting to see."
The nCino Platform fundamentally changed how Shawbrook’s credit teams work. With real-time insights, teams could finally be proactive rather than reactive. "We can be a lot more predictable of where work is coming through the pipeline and therefore helping us be a lot more responsive," Bird reveals. "The teams can manage their time better, manage their tasks better, by being more predictable because of the platform."
Targeting 20% Capacity Growth
With the initial project launch now complete, Shawbrook is focused on measuring concrete results. "The benefits that we're targeting are about a 20% uplift in capacity, so we want our portfolio managers to be able to manage 20% more customers within their portfolios," Bird explains.
Twenty percent capacity growth with the same team size will fundamentally change Shawbrook's growth trajectory while maintaining the high-touch service that defines their brand.
Customer experience improvements are equally central. By tracking flight time and identifying friction points, the bank expects faster responses and improved conversion rates. "We can really start to identify where we have potentially bottlenecks in the process, maybe friction points in the process, where maybe we can be more responsive to those deals," Bird notes.
The Real Prize: An AI-Ready Foundation
While operational improvements deliver immediate value, Bird and her team are focused on something more strategic: positioning Shawbrook for AI-driven competitive advantage. The challenge with AI in banking has always been data. Without clean, centralized, structured data, AI initiatives remain theoretical. But nCino changed that equation.
"What nCino has given us is a really solid foundation for our data, our data tracking, data capture, data quality," Bird explains. "And then we will look to use that as a baseline for building AI on the top of."
With comprehensive data now flowing through a unified platform—deal structures, credit decisions, customer interactions, covenant compliance—Shawbrook has the data to train AI models that deliver genuine business value. Shawbrook’s AI roadmap focuses on two areas:
Accelerating Credit Decisioning: Using AI to support faster credit decisioning, specifically automating document collation, structuring proposals, and accelerating deal forums.
Proactive Portfolio Management: Leveraging customer data to enable proactive monitoring, identify early warnings, and surface relationship opportunities.
"We'll be able to capture centrally in life on our customers as well and how we can monitor those more proactively through that data. That's the two areas that we'll really focus on from an AI point of view," says Bird.
Partnership as Competitive Advantage
Technology alone doesn't drive transformation—partnership does. Throughout the 18-month journey, the collaborative relationship with nCino proved critical.
"It's been a great partnership with nCino. The teams have worked really well together and collaborated," Bird reflects. "It's been great to feel that nCino has just become part of the Shawbrook family, particularly from an in-life, in day-to-day working perspective. We really value that at Shawbrook with a partnership."
That partnership mindset became even more valuable when Shawbrook acquired ThinCats—another nCino customer further along their transformation journey.
"Acquiring ThinCats is a really great opportunity for us. ThinCats are a lot further ahead on their nCino journey than us," Bird explains. "So we're really excited to learn from them as a partner and see how they've enhanced the platform and take some of the great learnings that they've put into play. So it's really positive that we can join together, share those learnings on both sides, and optimize more consistently across the two teams."
The acquisition created a unique advantage: two organizations with similar cultures and business models, now able to share best practices and accelerate innovation together.
Looking back, Bird offers candid advice for other institutions considering similar programs. "We really used the nCino Platform as an opportunity to improve our business processes, create some consistency and create the data as well for the insights,” she says. “That transformation upfront and that discovery phase is really, really important to start you off on the right foot forward."
The key is thinking transformation, not just technology.
What's Next
This is just the beginning of nCino and Shawbrook Bank’s partnership. "We would like to do a lot more with nCino as a platform. We've really only just started on our journey," Bird emphasizes. "Although we've been working together for the last 18 months or so, there's a lot more we can do. I still see this as very early days in terms of how we can optimize going forward."
For a bank built on high-touch service, the nCino Platform isn't replacing human expertise—it's amplifying it. Portfolio managers can focus on relationships. Credit teams can work proactively. Ultimately, the organization gains the data foundation needed to compete in an AI-powered future.