Atom Bank August 2020

ATOM BANK

Transforming banking by building on the cloud

IN ASSOCIATION WITH

DIGITAL REPORT 2020

Transforming banking by building on the cloud 02

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ATOM BANK

Rana Bhattacharya, CTO, Atom bank, guides us through the benefits of being a challenger, the response to COVID-19 and the company’s upcoming launch of its new banking platform

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aunched in 2016, Atom bank was the first UK bank built exclusively for mobile, with the intention of never hav-

ing any physical branches. Its approach has won it significant plaudits, including a position in 04

Tech Nation’s Future Fifty, alongside being the number one rated UK bank on consumer review site Trustpilot.

The company’s Chief Technology Officer, Rana Bhattacharya, is clear that part of the reason for its success is its smaller team and challenger culture. “We get a lot done with not a lot of people,” he says. “There’s a level of bureaucracy that’s removed, meaning you can make decisions quickly. And by virtue of that, small teams can accomplish brilliant outcomes and create changes and deploy them to production on the same day. As a digital native you have to embrace change. Whereas in some of the traditional banks, with the governance models and the people that have been there for a long time, it’s much harder for change to happen.”

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Rana Bhattacharya, CTO, Atom bank www.a t o mba n k. co. u k

ATOM BANK

“ Everyone just got on with it and made it work, and you can only do that if you already have the capability and the culture to make those things happen” — Rana Bhattacharya, CTO, Atom bank 06

Atom launched with marketleading Fixed Saver accounts and secured business lending for SMEs. It followed with mortgages in December 2016 and since then has taken £1.8bn in deposits and lent over £2.4bn to small businesses and homeowners. “We exist to create better outcomes for our customers,” says Bhattacharya. “We’re leveraging technologies to automate more and provide a first-class service to them. And by not having the baggage that some of the more traditional

Welcome to Atom bank CLICK TO WATCH

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07 banks have, we can create material

and put Atom and our customers

savings to pass on to our customers.”

in control. For a bank that’s building

The bank is undergoing a techno-

itself for long-term sustainability

logical transformation, launching a

and delivering true customer value,

brand new banking platform more

investment in the right technology

in step with how the market has

is key.”

developed. “Cloud hosting of banking

“We’re heavily using DevOps, so

software wasn’t an option when Atom

IT4IT,” he says. “Historically if you

was authorised,” says Bhattacharya.

imagine an on-premise environment,

“As a business committed to taking

especially with a third party model, it

advantage of the very best systems to

can take up to 42 weeks, if you’re lucky,

run our bank, and with investors who

to commission a new instance. Now, on

are right behind our commitment to

the cloud using DevOps, we can stand

technology, we are adopting systems

up an instance of the bank on the cloud

that are built specifically for the cloud

in under a week. That gives you a lot www.a t o mba n k. co. u k

“Working with Thought Machine has been revolutionary. The Vault platform is quick and agile.

Its unique features enable us to bring new experiences to banking with velocity, all the while keeping quality high and costs low.�

Rana Bhattacharya, CTO Atom bank

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Powering Atom bank to reinvent banking

The revolutionary power of the cloud The world’s largest technology brands - Netflix, Spotify, Google - all operate exclusively on the cloud. Yet it’s a universal truth that the banking industry has been held back by legacy technology stifling innovation, and at huge costs. While banks accept that a move towards modern, cloud native systems is necessary, fullscale banking transformation can be daunting. Meanwhile, the next wave of challenger banks are able to start afresh and build their bank in the cloud.

The benefits of a Vault engine At Thought Machine, we created a product to power any bank. Our product is Vault, a cloud native, core banking engine. Vault was built by former senior Google engineers, and can be configured to run any type of bank and launch any type of product. Vault’s unique features enable banks to transmit their vision into the hands of the customers, while taking full advantage of the cloud.

Innovation Vault’s hyper-configurable platform enables banks to reinvent customer experience as new features and interfaces can be designed and rolled out quickly and with more agility. Banks powered by Vault are ‘always up’, even during product launches.

Security Vault’s technology is designed to provide security through all levels of the infrastructure.

If a server in the cloud malfunctions, another server is spun up to absorb the functions, ensuring that the bank doesn’t have to go offline. Meanwhile, data is encrypted creating superior analytics as banks can capture, store and view data to identify unusual behaviour.

Automation Vault operates a highly automated DevOps environment – nearly everything traditionally done with manual intervention in a traditional data centre can be performed automatically.

This means banks can regain control of their workflows, while keeping costs low.

Partnering with Atom bank Atom bank chose Vault to power its bank as they wanted a platform that would enable them to keep innovating at pace, just as they did when they brought biometrics to UK banking. Since partnering with Thought Machine last year, Atom bank has been leveraging Vault’s cuttingedge technology to streamline their workflows and bring new products to market with speed.

Our teams will be working together to launch products designed with unique features to bring unseen experiences to the banking industry.

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ATOM BANK

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of capability by virtue of not being

offer us a managed service that we’ll

hamstrung by the number of environ-

be plugging into, but everything that

ments. The cost model is different

we manage and change ourselves

because effectively you can spin

will be hosted on the cloud. We’re

up an environment and once you’ve

effectively building a state-of-the-art

used it, you can kill it (treating envi-

bank hosted on Google Cloud.”

ronments as cattle, versus pets).”

The Atom banking machine is what

The company is also leveraging emerging technologies for such

Bhattacharya calls the new cloud-

things as enterprise decision-mak-

based infrastructure and associated

ing, including pricing and financial

software components. “The majority

forecasting. “We’ve built an in-house

of the estate is being moved onto

machine learning model to inject

Google Cloud Platform. We’ll still

some insights into that. From an

have a number of third parties who

operations perspective, we use

machine learning to support activi-

traffic by default alongside not trust-

ties like credit risk scoring, instant

ing the device. We always look to

pricing quotes for business banking,

leverage a zero-trust model, which is

and anti money-laundering identifi-

important as a bank,” Bhattacharya

cation and prevention.”

reiterates. “We have a continuous

For a bank, security is paramount,

security testing cycle using third

and Atom’s cybersecurity protection is

parties to give us more information

comprehensive. It utilises encryption,

about security threats from their

access control, vulnerability manage-

perspectives. Our security is strict,

ment, firewalling, DDoS scrubbing

it’s very tight and we clearly classify

amongst other security controls to

data as part of managing it, as well

protect its customers’ data.

as from a security perspective.”

“We look at the full stack in terms of protection the app, has encrypted

The technology Atom uses is in service of providing a better

E X E C U T I V E P R O FILE :

Rana Bhattacharya Title: Chief Technology Officer Company: Atom bank Industry: Financial Services Location: Durham Recognised by Computing as one of the top 250 IT Leaders in 2019, and a member of the Executive Committee at Atom since April 2017, responsible for IT, Change and Programme Management. Rana has experience in large-scale systems development and delivery success for major players in the finance sector. Before joining Atom, Rana held roles such as Chief Architect at Nationwide Building Society and Senior Manager for Architecture and Delivery at Accenture. www.a t o mba n k. co. u k

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How does Atom bank make digital identity journeys fast, safe, and seamless?

Since 2014, Daon has partnered with Atom in pioneering biometric banking in the UK, leading the way as the first app-only bank and the first to use face and voice biometrics for account login. With best-in-class biometrics and biometric liveness through Daon’s IdentityX® platform at its core, Atom delivers a fast, safe, and seamless experience to all users, everywhere, independent of their personal device’s features or limitations. From account creation to authentication, customers are in control of their own digital identity journeys with the least friction and the most security. It’s no wonder Atom is the UK’s most trusted bank according to Trustpilot.

1 billion+ 100 million+ 160+ 150+ 100+ 20+

identities we’ve been chosen to secure authentications performed each day groundbreaking biometric technology patents major financial institutions using our technology biometric algorithms we’ve road tested from 75+ vendors years as the most trusted name in biometric identity assurance

The World’s Most Trusted Identity Journeys • www.daon.com

“ I’m proud of Atom and proud of my team to have been able to get us to where we are now” — Rana Bhattacharya, CTO, Atom bank

away from using Unity for our mobile apps, which is more of a gaming platform, rebuilding it on native technology, running faster with a new UX. And that’s been quite well received.

There’s still some improvements to make, but on iOS, we now have an app store rating of 4.6.”

Google is a significant partner for Atom, with their relationship serving as a model for how Bhattacharya

customer experience, both directly

approaches suppliers and partners.

and indirectly. “We’re transform-

“Google not only provides us with

ing, not just from a technology

infrastructure but elements of data

perspective, but also by taking on

and other capabili-

more internal accountability,” says

ties. For us, it was

Bhattacharya. “We’re insourcing

quite an impor-

more, meaning that Atom can make

tant decision to

key changes across its IT estate

choose a cloud

without external resource require-

vendor.

ment enabling a greater pace of change. And this is the power behind Atom’s banking machine which fuses technology, people as well as data to provide benefits to our customers.”

Other customer-centric achievements include the resolution of 97% of support tickets within SLA, and the improvement of its apps. “In December of last year, we moved www.cwww.a o mpa ny t o mba we bsit n k.e. co. com uk

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ATOM BANK

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As we moved to the cloud, we wanted a partner, not a supplier, someone to engage with us as an entity, work with and help us. We felt having a partner - a real partner - was 50% of the transformation, someone on your side to help you succeed. And that’s what we found in Google.” Atom has found other partners to boost capability in other areas, as Bhattacharya explains: “Thought Machine has a pivotal role to play within our transformation. We’re looking to run Thought Machine as a cloud native, smart contractbased core banking platform on Google. What that will allow us to do is basically define any type of product we could imagine - and do this in house. As part of our launch in 2016, we partnered with DAON and pioneered the use of biometrics in the UK banking industry and led the way with face and voice biometrics as core credentials to log-in to your bank. As a team we continue to make improvements because we’re committed to exceptional customer experiences.” www.a t o mba n k. co. u k

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ATOM BANK

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is putting a strain on business worldwide, uprooting long-established ways of doing business.

Bhattacharya emphasises the need for understanding during these difficult times, saying: “You have to put more emphasis on bilateral and team communications, as well as wellness. In terms of my team and colleagues, the current pandemic has brought a different perspective on life and the need to ensure, yes 16

you get the work done, but also that people are well and healthy both physically and mentally.”

“ By not having the baggage that some of the more traditional banks have, we can create some material savings to pass on to our customers” — Rana Bhattacharya, CTO, Atom bank

Bhattacharya credits the company’s resilience to its employees.

“I think it’s a testament to the folks in our team. We implemented home working very rapidly - before the official lockdown came into place.

In terms of our security and the networks team, within a two to three week period, they got all of our employees working from home successfully, including the contact centre. I don’t think we would be able to support and service our

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customers the way we have been

with a small number of people and

able to, if we hadn’t had that inherent

a comparatively small budget is sig-

capability in the bank. Everyone just

nificant. I’m proud of Atom and proud

got on with it and made it work, and

of my team to have been able to get

you can only do that if you already

us to where we are now, closing off a

have the capability and the culture to

few items to get us ready to go live.”

make those things happen.”

As Atom comes close to going live with its Banking Machine, Bhattacharya is clear that it has been down to the dedication of his team in challenging and uncertain circumstances. “What we’ve done www.a t o mba n k. co. u k

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