The efficient treatment of dense matrices arising, e.g., from the finite element discretisation of integral operators requires special compression techniques. In this article we use the -matrix representation that approximates the dense stiffness matrix in admissible blocks (corresponding to subdomains where the underlying kernel function is smooth) by low-rank matrices. The low-rank matrices are assembled by a new hybrid algorithm (HCA) that has the same proven convergence as standard interpolation but also the same efficiency as the (heuristic) adaptive cross approximation (ACA).