As competition intensifies in specialist SME lending, Shawbrook Bank found its growth ambitions increasingly constrained by outdated processes and fragmented technology. Despite its strong reputation for bespoke, high-touch commercial lending, the UK-based bank was struggling to manage complex deals efficiently. Portfolio managers were relying on spreadsheets and SharePoint folders, credit teams lacked real-time visibility, and capacity limitations were starting to restrict the bank’s ability to scale.
To address these challenges, Shawbrook Bank turned to the nCino Platform to modernise its lending and portfolio management operations.
The operational strain was being felt across the organisation. With multiple data sources and manual workflows, teams spent significant time tracking information rather than managing relationships. Shawbrook Bank commercial product officer Louise Bird highlighted the pressure this placed on staff and growth plans. “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.”
Recognising that incremental fixes would not be enough, Shawbrook’s leadership explored whether to build a solution internally or partner with a specialist technology provider. nCino’s established track record in SME lending made it a natural candidate, but the bank wanted proof it could address Shawbrook’s 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. Scalability, especially within credit management, emerged as a critical requirement.
To validate the decision, Shawbrook conducted a rigorous proof of concept, attempting to recreate nCino’s functionality in-house. The exercise quickly highlighted the limitations of a build-first approach. “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. The conclusion was clear: partnering with nCino would deliver faster speed to market and provide industry expertise that would take years to develop internally.
Implementation began in April 2024 with a deliberate, phased strategy. Shawbrook focused first on core commercial lending products, aiming to prove the model before extending it across other verticals. “Our first users onboarded deals going live through the system around the end of February, so 10 months after discovery,” Bird shares. This repeatable approach prioritised origination, followed by portfolio management and then migration, creating consistency across product lines.
The shift away from spreadsheets delivered immediate benefits. nCino provided a single source of truth, improving traceability and visibility across the deal lifecycle. “For us it’s really about having that traceability, the visibility of those deals going through the system,” Bird emphasises. Real-time insights have also enabled teams to better anticipate workloads. “We can be a lot more predictable of where work is coming through the pipeline and therefore helping us be a lot more responsive,” she adds.
With the platform now live, Shawbrook Bank is targeting a 20% uplift in portfolio management capacity without increasing headcount. Improving customer experience is equally important, supported by better identification of bottlenecks and friction points. “We can really start to identify where we have potentially bottlenecks in the process,” Bird notes.
Beyond operational efficiency, the longer-term prize is strategic. By centralising and structuring its data through nCino, Shawbrook has laid the groundwork for AI-driven innovation. “What nCino has given us is a really solid foundation for our data, our data tracking, data capture, data quality,” Bird explains. Future plans include accelerating credit decisioning and enabling proactive portfolio management.
The partnership has also taken on added significance following Shawbrook’s acquisition of ThinCats, another nCino customer. “Acquiring ThinCats is a really great opportunity for us,” Bird says, highlighting the potential to share best practices and accelerate optimisation across both organisations.
Looking ahead, Shawbrook sees its collaboration with nCino as still in its early stages. “We’ve really only just started on our journey,” Bird emphasises. By addressing its core operational challenges first, the bank has positioned itself to scale sustainably while preserving the high-touch service that defines its SME lending proposition.
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