Member Article

Durham's Atom Bank appoints first registered intermediary

Atom Bank, the UK’s only digital bank, has appointed its first registered intermediary to support its mission to change the face of SME banking.

Newton Aycliffe finance firm Commercial Expert has been chosen as the first introducer to the Durham-based bank, which launched its new app earlier this year.

Created in April 2014, Atom currently employs just over 190 people at its offices at Aykley Heads in Durham and was launched after raising more than £135m from over 100 private and institutional investors.

It launched its new app, which enables customers to create new accounts within minutes at the touch of a button, in April. Atom is now offering secured lending to SMEs through specialist business intermediaries, with FCA-regulated Commercial Expert the first to come on board.

Commercial Expert, which manages more than £48m-worth of deals a year for clients nationwide, expanded to new offices in January after increasing its team to nine.

Mike Coates, Managing Director, said: “This is a huge feather in the cap for us and we’re delighted to be working with Atom.

“We have a similar viewpoint in having a modern approach to working with clients. The trouble with commercial finance is everything takes so long, and it shouldn’t. There are too many professionals who haven’t adapted to the modern world, but this is a bank which has been created for the modern world.

“We’re adjusting all the time to keep up with that. The world of sitting down with your bank manager, and convincing him that everything is OK, has almost completely gone. It’s now about scoring and information, modelling and forecasting, and doing it all online. We’re very commercially and IT aware, so the synchronicity between ourselves and Atom Bank is a perfect fit.”

Graham Moore, Head of Business Development at Atom Bank added: “We are excited to have Commercial Expert as our first registered intermediary to help us change the face of SME banking.

“We are both passionate about improving the end to end process for SMEs and really ‘lifting the lid’ so they fully understand how a bank makes the decisions it does, which we believe, working with their intermediary, can really help an SME to improve their business.

“The process we have developed has been designed to remove as many of the traditional friction points as possible and has been built with the intermediary in mind to ensure the flow of information is as painless as possible.”