Atom this week achieved  £3billion of residential mortgage completions and £1 billion in deposits into its Instant Saver accounts.

App-based Atom Bank, which calls itself the UK’s first bank completely for mobile, hit two major milestones this week on the same day: More than £3 billion of residential mortgage completions and £1 billion in deposits into its Instant Saver accounts. The growth has encouraged the company enough to reconfirm its intention to go public in the next two years. (Finextra)

Financial inclusion

Atom was founded in 2014 and became a regulated bank in June 2015. It launched its Fixed Saver accounts and secured loans for UK smaller businesses (SMEs) in April 2016; and followed up with mortgages in November 2016.

In September 2020, Atom launched Insta Saver, the first product to be launched on its state of the art cloud-native banking platform, and offering a highly competitive interest rate of 0.75% AER (variable rate), which was 75x more than the high street banks.

“Reaching £1bn in Instant Saver balances is a key a moment of truth for both Atom’s new tech platform and its decision to compete in instant access savings alongside its long-standing and award-winning fixed rate products,” the bank said in a statement.

On mortgages, Atom has to date provided 21,700 mortgage offers worth £3.97bn and helped 16,400 households complete new mortgages to a total value of £3bn.

“Atom continues to bring its combination of app-based customer experience and competitive pricing to those parts of the market where competition is most important, particularly for customers with smaller deposits and those with less than perfect credit history,” the digital bank said.

Price-conscious market

“We don’t carry excess costs in our business and so in a price-led market we can pay our savers more and charge our borrowers less,” said Edward Twiddy, Chief Customer Officer at Atom. “That has to be better for everyone, and the progress we continue to make suggests that we are getting a lot right.”

In April, Atom announced the signing of a £40m raise led by Toscafund Asset Management LLP and BBVA. The raise included an offer to participate for qualifying shareholders in new ‘A’ class shares in Atom priced at 60 pence.

Atom said it anticipated that its IPO would take place “in the next two years.”

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