After a three-month search the team behind Britain’s first all-digital bank has announced its bricks-and-mortar headquarters will be in Durham City.
An initial 50 members of staff will move into 10,000sq ft of the county council-owned Northumbria House this summer with the Atom Bank offices gradually spreading to take over the entire Aykley Heads building in the run up to its 2015 on-line launch.
The two men behind the venture are Metro Bank-founder Anthony Thomson and former First Direct chief executive, Mark Mullen. They have now been joined by Ed Twiddy, a former Treasury director and the one-time head of the region’s regeneration body the North-East Local Enterprise Partnership.
In April the trio received a six-figure investment from Middleton Enterprises — the firm owned by North-East businessman Jeremy Middleton — in exchange for a promise to return hundreds of finance jobs to the region.
“The demise of Northern Rock released a lot of really good people into the market,” said Thomson, who believes a successful Atom Bank could employ more than 400 people. “There’s a very big pool of talent out there.”
For Simon Henig, the leader of Durham County Council, Atom’s decision to settle on the city is a “very significant endorsement of the County Durham Plan … Alongside the creation of hundreds of jobs this sends a very strong message that Durham is a forward thinking, business-minded county ready and waiting to do what it takes to help companies deliver on their ambitions.”
Traditional branch banking, Thomson believes, has been in unstoppable decline for years. In 2007 he co-founded Metro Bank and is convinced that with almost six-million people now using a smartphone or pad even more will choose to do their financial transactions on line.
It’s a shifting statistic, however, with a recent Accenture survey claiming that face-to-face banking has actually increased since 2012 with both weekly and monthly visitors on the rise.
Thompson says it’s more about which survey you accept. “The European Financial Management Association says that within four years 60 per cent of all banking decisions will be done on a mobile device,” he countered.
“I’m not saying there’s no future for branches, and I accept absolutely that there are times when you need to speak to someone for complex things like mortgages. For times like that our customers will be able to open up a video window to have an online chat.”
So how does internet banking work? Paying bills, transferring money, questions about statements, credit card applications and mortgage lending will all be processed online. Cheques or money orders are credited to your account by using a special smartphone application to take a picture and then upload the image to Atom.
Telephone support will be available if customers have problems during a transaction, but no banking procedures will be carried out over the phone.
It’s all, Thompson stresses, about convenience and getting money in to an out of your account and paying bills as fast and as painlessly as possible. “This isn’t just for hip, young techno-geeks, this is technology that we all use everyday,” he adds. “I would hesitate to say that we will be a market leader but we will be there, or thereabouts, because of the low cost base that we will have.”
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