The Anonymous Widower

Why Would You Create A New Digital Bank In Durham?

I’ve only one regret about my investment in Zopa and that is that I didn’t invest earlier. I could only have invested a few months earlier, as the financial web site hadn’t been created.

Recently, I’ve seen mention of Atom Bank in the press and this afternoon I went to have a dig around the Internet at what has been trailed as a new form of digital bank.

I found this article on the Finanser web site, which is an interview with Mark Mullen, who is the CEO of Atom Bank.

The interview contains a lot of sensible and surprising facts.

They are creating the whole digital bank from scratch and Mullen has a refreshingly blunt attitude to consultants (He doesn’t use them!), which I wholly agree with. So much so, if I was developing a bank with my old Chairman at Metier,we’d probably do it the same way.

As an example of Mullen’s thinking, I’ll copy his reasons for basing the bank in Durham.

There is a lot to be said for being outside London, not least because it’s an expensive place to base a business. If you don’t need to be in London it doesn’t make sense to place a business where the ground rents and employment costs are so high, and where the markets are so massively competitive. Durham is appealing as the real estate is less expensive; but cheap land gets you nowhere when you’re building a high end company. So as importantly there are also fabulous universities; a huge population catchment area; and the city is well connected by trains to north and south. Equally, there is actually not that much in the way of alternative financial institutions, so we are offering an alternative employment proposition in the local market. That’s quite an attractive thing to do.

I shall be watching Atom Bank with interest.

July 2, 2015 - Posted by AnonW | Finance | Atom Bank, Banks