The History of Atom Bank with Simon Dawson

Wiktor Żołnowski: Wiktor Żołnowski, welcome to Pragmatic Talks, a podcast and video series where we discuss startups, contemporary digital product development, modern technologies, and product management. I am Wiktor Żołnowski, the CEO of Pragmatic Coders, the first-choice software development partner for startup founders. For today’s episode, we invited Simon Dawson, Head of Engineering at Atom Bank, a fast-growing challenger bank from the UK. We will discuss Atom Bank’s history, how they managed to become a competitor to all well-established banks in just a few years, what were the biggest challenges during this scaling process, what is the role of Head of Engineering, and who should hire for such a role. So welcome, everyone. Today we are hosting Simon Dawson, who is the Head of Engineering at Atom Bank.

Thank you, Wiktor. It’s a pleasure to host you here. The very first question that I always ask is, who is Simon Dawson?

Simon Dawson: Well, so as you say, Head of Engineering at Atom Bank. I’ve worked in technology for an awful long time, about 25 years. So since leaving university, I graduated and the first job I did was working for a bank, a big bank in the UK. I joined their graduate I.T. program, as it was. And then I moved into a different industry. So I left banking and moved into manufacturing, moved into healthcare, then I worked for a very big SI for a long time. And during that time, I worked on a lot of different client accounts, a lot of UK government work, and a lot of financial services work. But I’ve been at Atom Bank for five years and I’ve enjoyed the experience and the journey that we’ve been on as a bank.

About Atom Bank

Wiktor Żołnowski: We are going to talk about this today. So maybe you could tell us a little bit more about Atom Bank.

Simon Dawson: Sure. So Atom Bank is a UK-only bank, and we are a mobile-only bank, which is not revolutionary now, but it was revolutionary in 2014-2015 when the bank was launched. At the time, we were the first bank in the UK which was mobile app only. And so any customer who wanted to bank with Atom had to download our app from the App Store or Play Store. And since then, our ethos has really been about, how can we create a bank that is as customer-centric as possible? How can we pay our savers the best savings rate we can and give our borrowers the lowest rate we can, which is kind of the opposite from those banks? So we are trying to do something different and trying to disrupt the market.

As I say, Atom’s been around since 2014-2015. We launched to a very small customer base, at a very small product base. What we do today, we still don’t have huge numbers of products. We focus largely on personal savings, so savings accounts which are either fixed by their rate and their term, or instant access where you essentially can save your money and you can pull your money in and out and move it in and out as much as you can. So more transactional-type banking. And we also do mortgages. So mortgages for residential customers, so people who want to buy homes. We do loans, we do business loans, and that’s about it. It’s not a huge product range. It’s a very simple business model.

We’ve got some really great customer ratings. So I don’t know if you know, but we’re a five-star rated app on Android and iOS, and we’re 4.8 on Trustpilot. So our customers obviously like this. We’re doing something right.

What makes Atom Bank successful

Wiktor Żołnowski: So what distinguishes your bank from other banks? Especially, what makes you so successful in terms of customer trust and this kind of rating of your app?

Simon Dawson: I think it’s the… our CEO was talking to us about this last week, and I think it’s the fact we are trying to do things differently. So when interest rates go up, we pass on the interest rate rise to customers immediately. Most banks don’t do that. They do something called lead-lag, which is they will pass on the rate, but they will wait, and in the period they wait, they will make quite a lot of money. So in the UK, the Bank of England raised the interest rates last Thursday at midday. At 10 p.m. last Thursday, we’d already raised our interest rates for all of our products. No bank does that. So the technology allows us to do that, and I’m sure other banks have the technology to allow them to do that, but it doesn’t always transpire that that happens. So I think that’s a differentiator. Banks trust Atom.

And also on the mortgages side, we try to be as competitive as possible. So we’re not, you know, we’re trying to create a product range where we are competitive around what we’re charging people to borrow money at. So there’s those two things, but there’s also ease of use. So we spent a lot of time in the last two years working on the app in terms of trying to make that app, in terms of the look and feel and the usability of the app, as easy as possible. And I think if you look at the App Store ratings, the Play Store ratings and Trustpilot, you can see that it’s very easy to open an account and fund an account. So those things combined, I think, give us a fairly unique proposition in the market. And it’s an ethos to Atom to be as easy to use as possible for customers while also being very competitive on rates.

Addressing the market

Wiktor Żołnowski: You mentioned the mortgages, you mentioned that you want to be as easy to use as possible, etc. So are you addressing some kind of niche of clients, or are you just addressing the broad market? And if you feel that there are people in all of the segments who would like to use such an app?

Simon Dawson: So I think our current market, in terms of our demographics, is probably a more elderly market in terms of that savings proposition because in the UK, there’s a large amount of money in that demographic. So that’s definitely on the savings. On the mortgages side, what we want to do is enable anyone who wants to buy their first house to fund that through Atom. And we’re definitely looking at different types of products. So initially, we were quite risk-averse around mortgages in terms of loan-to-value and who we would lend money to. We changed that in recent times to increase the number of customers we have. Mortgages is an interesting one because there is no product out there in the market which is fully in-app for mortgages, and we’ve actually been working on a product to do that for quite some time, and we’re starting to release features around that. So the whole idea of your mortgage is coming up for renewal and you want to renew your mortgage, we want to make that as easy as possible for existing customers so they don’t go away and take a mortgage with another lender. So doing all that within the app themselves, rather than having to fill in forms, be it website forms or ring contact centers or do all other things. That’s part of the drive we went around mortgages because there’s a lot of business that we could retain. It’s easier to retain business than win new business. So that is a focus for us currently, and for our mortgages value stream, they’re working on retentions.

Wiktor Żołnowski: I mean, it’s very important to mention that the UK banking market is quite different from other markets in Europe and the US and other stuff. And as far as I know, there’s a lot of paperwork. And what you are doing is you are digitalizing this paperwork, making it smooth for each user, and that is something that’s very distinctive, very distinguishing.

Simon Dawson: And you’re absolutely right, Wiktor. There are a lot of manual processes, particularly in mortgages. So we are trying to digitize that and make that as much in-app as possible and as easy for the customers as possible to say, “Oh, my mortgage is about to come to an end. Let me see what Atom can offer me for a new mortgage,” and do that all within the app.

Wiktor Żołnowski: So you’re actually moving UK banking into the 21st century.

Simon Dawson: Trying!

The four-day work week

Wiktor Żołnowski: Okay, so I know that you’re also not only disturbing the banking products, but also you are doing some things differently in terms of how you build this product, how you build the bank. And there are a few things that you’re doing differently with managing people and working on a day-to-day basis. So maybe you can tell us more about this.

Simon Dawson: One of the big things for Atom, and it’s been quite a lot in the press, certainly in the press in the UK, and it actually received worldwide coverage a lot when it was announced, is the four-day working week. So, you know, all of our team, whether it’s our technology team, our finance team, our legal team, or our operations team, all of the bank works four days a week, which is quite revolutionary because all of us have worked a five-day week in an office-space type job forever. So when our CEO announced about a year and a half ago that he was going to change the bank and move us all to a four-day week, we were all a bit, “Really?” But here we are a year and a half later, and we are working a four-day week. And that extends to the partners we work with as well. So the Pragmatic Coders team that we work with, they also work a four-day week.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Yes, so it was also challenging for us to manage the company where part of the company is working four days a week and the part’s working five days a week. But it was also very interesting since we can observe the differences between those two approaches and see and compare which was better. And actually, it’s hard to tell which one is working better. But I wonder how it looks from your perspective. How do you rate it after some time already?

Simon Dawson: After a year, I think there are different lenses you can look at it through. So we trialed this for quite a long time. It was something we implemented, but we always implemented it with a view of, “We are going to try this.” And during that trial, we’re going to gather metrics. We’re going to gather metrics across the organization, so operational metrics, metrics in terms of the technology, people metrics, how people feel, and things like stress and sick days and all of those things, but also the impact on the customers, so ratings of the app and all this. So we’ve gathered all of those metrics, and broadly, those metrics were positive when we aligned the view pre-four-day to four-day. So there was no reason not to do it. And we also surveyed our people quite regularly and took all that feedback.

I think purely on the people’s side, the vast majority of people really enjoy the four-day week and they’ve adjusted their lives now to fit around that. So they feel, certainly from the people in my team I talk to regularly, they feel one day, the Thursday, is pretty tough since it’s a long day and you have a lot to do. But then you have a full three-day break. And because we in technology all have the same day off, we don’t have dependencies across different teams. So that’s really positive.

I also think it makes you a bit more focused. So you have a shorter window of basically getting things done. So you actually are really focused on, “What am I going to achieve this week?” And actually, I can only do that until Thursday afternoon. We can’t do it on Fridays, because there was a temptation early on to say, “Well, if we don’t finish on Thursday, we’ll work on Friday.” We sort of stopped that. That was a behavior we’d seen, but we said, “No, that isn’t the four-day week. That’s not a contingency there. That’s just a day if we have real issues and we have to call people out and fix things.”

So I think, broadly, really positive on an engagement point of view. Massive difference in retention. So obviously, post-COVID, Atom being very much a technology fintech company, probably experienced what most of the other companies were experiencing, and there was a lot of attrition. A lot of people were moving on, doing other things. The four-day week almost stopped that overnight. So it massively helped retention, and it also helped attract really good engineers as well. But some people, depending on what stage of life they’re in, they looked at the four-day week and think that’s a really attractive thing for us. And I don’t really feel there are any huge negatives. I do feel that you need to be really focused Monday to Thursday, and I think people are. And you just need to be a bit more planned around your releases. So if we’re going to release a new feature in production, we don’t do it on a Friday. People aren’t around then; we don’t want to take that risk. So you then have to think, “Well, I’ve got a four-day window.” Of course, in that, your Friday is your new Saturday. So you have a four-day window when you’re going to release changes.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Are you releasing on Thursday?

Simon Dawson: We’ll release on Thursday, yeah. Not every week, but we do release on Thursday. We tend to do most of our releases Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.

Wiktor Żołnowski: It’s still, as we spoke before, that for many old banks, let’s call them, considering if we should release on Friday or Tuesday or one particular day a week is something pretty unusual because some of them at least, or maybe not all of them, but some of them struggle to release like once a month or once a quarter. Some of them are even releasing once a year. So the problem that you have, or maybe not the problem but actually the question that you’re trying to answer if you should release on Friday where no one is there, is actually still way in front of your competitors.

Simon Dawson: Yeah, I agree. I think it’s a nice problem to have because we have that capability to do that. We’re just choosing not to because we don’t have the wider team around on the Friday.

Scaling Atom Bank

Wiktor Żołnowski: So Atom Bank is not a startup anymore, it’s more like a scale-up. How many people do you have right now?

Simon Dawson: So the company now is around about 450. So you’re absolutely right, it’s moved beyond that startup mentality now. In terms of the culture, it has changed. I mean, I’ve been around for almost five years, and I’ve seen a big change in that, how the culture of the organization is changing, how the organization has matured. And the organization is much more now on a product basis. So we’re thinking more about products. We’ve recently reorganized into what we call value streams. So within the bank, we have five value streams: we have Mortgages, we have Savings, we have Business Banking, Enterprise, and Platform. And it’s not an unusual way to set yourself up in terms of industry thinking, but we would never have been mature enough to do that two or three years ago. At that point, we were very much starting to build our team and build our platform and build our app. That’s all in place for us now. It’s all around agility, speed, and scaling, but scaling safely. Reputation, brand awareness is pretty big now, so we don’t want to scale, but scale in a way that it’s not sustainable.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Stability of the system is something that is very important for you.

Simon Dawson: Massively important. We have a huge amount of metrics around customer traffic, customer volume, and in the background, we’re doing a huge amount of work around understanding where the constraints are in the system, so where your bottlenecks are. So we fix one constraint, we move on to the next one. And that’s the way we’re trying to tackle our… you know, the business plan says we’re going to have X number of customers in the next five years. What we want to know is, can our system sustain that number of customers? At what point do we start to hit issues? And then where do we hit those issues? So it’s not something we really talk about hugely outside of engineering, but that’s what we’re focused on massively at the moment. It’s around how much the system scales.

Wiktor Żołnowski: So how did Atom Bank look when you joined five years ago? How many people were there?

Simon Dawson: So when I joined five years ago, there would be less… within the entire bank, there would be less than 100 people. The technology team was largely outsourced. So we talk about the old bank and the new bank. The old bank was largely a managed service run by another company, and we had a very small technology team within Atom. The intent was always to build a new bank on the cloud and at the same time build a team and build new apps. So we did that. Clearly, we’ve achieved that, but we had lots of things in flight at the same time. So we were asking, how do we move the bank from on-prem to cloud? How do we rebuild the app, because the original app was actually written in Unity, which is a games engine, which was troublesome, was difficult to test, and difficult to release frequently. But also, how did we build capability? Because all of the capability was with the company who looked after the existing bank. So we had all those three things to consider, and my role initially was, how do we move the bank to the cloud? So I did some of the architecture on how we did that. And then once we started that work, it was very quickly, well, what team do we need to do the work? How do we build that team? So we were very much building and scaling the team, and my initial team was three people. So myself and two SREs, one of them is still with us, obviously I am. And now engineering is around about 80 people, and technology is around about 150. So it’s grown pretty quickly.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Okay, yeah. In terms of how a company is growing, five times growth in five years, and in terms of the engineering, from 3 to 150 is like 50 times growth.

Simon Dawson: Yes, but one thing about Atom, the business model around Atom is also around scaling the bank in terms of number of customers, number of customer deposits, number of loans, but not scaling the workforce. We use automation. So we’ll probably get to around 500 employees this year, but we’re not looking to massively scale the workforce as we scale the customer base because we want to be an automated, lean back-end.

Evolving product challenges

Wiktor Żołnowski: Yes, that’s actually a great idea to focus on right now during the recession and other stuff where everyone is cutting costs and optimizing everything possible. I think you are in a great position right now to actually compete with others in terms of the people. They already… Tell us a lot more, tell us a lot about how it changed during the time. What about the product and your product focus? Like, what were the challenges five years ago, or four or five years ago, and what are the challenges right now?

Simon Dawson: Five years ago, we weren’t thinking of ourselves as a product company. We were thinking around, you know, we have an app, it’s not native, we have a banking platform, it’s on-prem, and it doesn’t scale well. So it was very much technology challenges. So the technology wasn’t able to underpin what the business wanted it to do. So we needed to create a scalable banking platform. How do we do that? So move that to the cloud. Now, obviously, that’s easier said than done and takes time and effort and money. But also, we needed to rewrite the app. So rewrite the app in the latest way we did that. And a couple of years ago, we started thinking, “Well, actually, we’ve done this now.” The challenges are less technological; they’re more around how do we align the organization? How do we align our technology team in the wider bank to better underpin the business plan around the key pillars of growth, around mortgages, around savings, around business banking? So we’re much more thinking like a product company, which we would never have been able to do before. And previously, we only had–we still had a savings and a mortgages product–but we didn’t have the capability to create new product ranges. We had a very much a fixed-rate saver product, but because we knew the bank wasn’t particularly scalable, we didn’t want to create a product which was much more transactional because then we would have created constraints. We knew the constraints we couldn’t fix existed.

Wiktor Żołnowski: So what are the current challenges? What is the most challenging right now? Or maybe there are some opportunities that you are going to chase for?

Simon Dawson: The challenges now, I think, are largely around prioritization of what do we work on. Because while we have all of these value streams, we always have that time-cost-quality conundrum. And we only have a finite number of people, we only have a finite amount of money, and we don’t want to compromise the quality. We’ve worked really hard to get the customer ratings to where they are. We don’t want to cut corners to basically damage the brand. So I think it’s now, really, the challenges at a very, very senior level in the bank are, what are the most important things we need to prioritize our finite number of resources to work on and deliver? I’ve got no issues that we could deliver them.

We do have a few technological challenges, as I say. So there are still some constraints within the cloud platform because we didn’t rebuild everything. We lifted and shifted some of the legacy technology, and we are starting to chip away at moving those. So there’s one system we’ve recently retired, we’re looking to retire another one, and all of that is around those systems just aren’t really cloud-native, they’re not easy to scale, they cost an awful lot of money, and they’re fairly proprietary in terms of how you develop products on them. So we’re doing that. And I think probably the last thing is around the agility part, around being able to quickly proof-of-concept an idea and take that idea into working software. We really need to speed up that flow.

Wiktor Żołnowski: So you’re optimizing time to market?

Simon Dawson: The way we’ve optimized our teams is nothing to do with utilization, it’s more on flow of work. Time to market. That is exactly what we’re optimizing right now. Whereas I think previously, we were optimizing purely around utilization and how busy were the teams and how many story points we were doing and all of this type of stuff.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Yes. Do you think that changing to a four-day work week has an impact on that somehow? Does it change your mindset in terms of, “We limited the time that we have, so we shouldn’t focus on the utilization anymore, we should focus on the value that we can deliver in a short time”?

Simon Dawson: I think that’s a very good point, Wiktor, and I think that’s definitely something that we’ve observed. Because with a four-day week, time can run away. In terms of you’re working in a sprint, and you’ve got eight days within this two-week sprint rather than ten days, and you’ve got a limited window when you can release out of the back of that sprint. So we are definitely thinking more around making sure that the teams have all of the skills and expertise within the team to deliver without having external dependencies, which previously is not something we paid as much attention to.

Wiktor Żołnowski: It’s actually adding this constraint of one day less work a week actually makes you stronger and more focused, as you mentioned before. We are going to work, and we need to figure out how to do this efficiently.

Simon Dawson: I think so because I think it’s really focused our minds because I don’t think we’re ever going to go back to five-day weeks. So this is the way.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Exactly. This is something that I haven’t thought about when considering a four-day week. Okay.

The impact of Brexit and COVID-19

Wiktor Żołnowski: I wonder if there was any impact of Brexit or COVID-19 on your day-to-day business?

Simon Dawson: So Brexit is an interesting one. The Atom app, as it stands, is a UK app. So the app’s actually geofenced. You can’t download the app if you’re in Europe, which was a bit of a challenge for the Pragmatic team initially when we had the guys working on the mobile app. So that was a challenge. But in terms of our business plan, I don’t think Brexit has massively impacted it in that we were never looking to expand into other markets. It has impacted a bit on the way, in terms of our people, in terms of we have a nearshore center in Poland, which I think has been a great success. But it’s possibly more difficult to navigate how you turn that into being actually part of Atom versus working with Pragmatic post-Brexit. I think that’s probably a bit more challenging now, but I don’t think it’s been a huge impact.

COVID-19 has been a bigger impact. So what we initially saw with COVID was, bizarrely, it really helped Atom because the products we had at that time were products that customers were using: savings accounts, mortgages. The UK market, and I’m not sure how the Polish market was, but the UK market was very much everyone was locked down, they couldn’t spend money on a lot of things. If they had money, they were either saving the money, and also the housing market, people were deciding to move out of the city into the country. And so the products we had, it was really quite fortunate that for us as a business, we didn’t get impacted at all. In fact, it was the opposite. It actually improved our business performance. But it had a huge impact on our teams because I remember at the time working on… we were actually in the middle of migrating the bank from on-prem to the cloud, and we probably had burnout in a lot of our teams because again, we didn’t have a lot else to do. So people were just working, and there was always lots of work. So we really came out the back of that with a lot of people feeling pretty burnt out and stressed.

And then we had the whole great resignation. So post-COVID, a lot of remote working, a lot of really good engineers we lost to cryptocurrency companies, a lot of cybersecurity companies. A lot of my team left to one particular crypto company, and it was really difficult to lose that many good people at one point.

Wiktor Żołnowski: I heard the story. What are they doing right now because of the crypto winter?

Simon Dawson: Well, some of them want to come back. But it had a huge impact on our capability. We went from being a very highly capable team to having a dip because we lost so much experience in a short space of time. And I spent most of 2021 almost working as a recruitment consultant trying to rebuild a team. Then we had the four-day-a-week initiative, and that kind of changed. So COVID-19 had a massive impact, and I think it’s impacted all our businesses. We no longer work in the office full-time. It’s very much a hybrid working environment, which I actually like and I think the team likes, but it has changed things in terms of how we work.

The role of a Head of Engineering

Wiktor Żołnowski: Okay, maybe let’s talk a little bit more about your role at Atom Bank. You’re Head of Engineering. I believe that many people who are just starting their startup journey wonder what the role of the Head of Engineering is, what are your responsibilities, and maybe some of the people who are listening to us or watching would be interested in if they should or when they should hire a Head of Engineering for their startup.

Simon Dawson: It’s a really good question, and it kind of depends on where you are on your journey. So if I take the Atom example, our first Engineering Head was probably hired, or we created that role, about three years ago. And it wasn’t me at the time; I was leading our SRE team, but we were very siloed. I think my role is largely around the capability of engineering, so overseeing all of our… so we split it fairly industry-standard around front-end technologies, back-end technologies, testing, and SRE. And all of those four areas have Engineering Managers, and all of those Engineering Managers are part of the Engineering Leadership Team alongside myself. So my role really is to make sure that the engineering practices, capabilities, disciplines that we have in the bank are as good as they can be for the bank. I don’t directly work in delivery, although all of my team works in delivery. So ultimately, I am accountable for delivery, but I’m not responsible for the day-to-day delivery.

For me, it’s about size and scale. Once you get to a certain size, you need to think around, well, you have a big team of developers, but who’s actually coaching those developers, who’s mentoring those developers, who’s leading those developers? You need to look at that, and that is something you need to consider when you’re in the double figures of developers. And we’re obviously at about 80 developers. I clearly can’t have one-to-ones with every developer, and I don’t, but I will be available to discuss anything with any of the developers when they need to. But I have a team who look after each of those different areas. I’m not hands-on anymore. I do keep abreast of our technologies because that’s part of my job to make sure that our engineering team is as good as it could be for the bank. I’m not sat writing code. I am reviewing code, and I am reviewing coding standards, and I am reviewing some of our key outputs and reviewing how we’re doing test automation and trying to set some direction on that and looking at modern engineering practices. I think you need to look at your scale, your size, and where you want to go with your organization. If you’re very much a build versus buy, then you’re going to have an engineering team. You’re going to need someone to lead that engineering team.

Advice for scaling startups

Wiktor Żołnowski: So in terms of scaling, what advice would you give to people who are already working on their product, working on their startups, and they see that they will need to scale up their business pretty soon? How should they prepare for that? What can they do right now?

Simon Dawson: It depends on the business and what their business goals are.

Wiktor Żołnowski: So maybe there are some common mistakes that you’ve seen in the past, or maybe there are some things that you think that you could’ve done better five years ago?

Simon Dawson: If I think of the Atom experience I have, I think you should never lose sight of where you want to get to. So it’s difficult to really think long term because so many things change, and a lot of things change that are outside your control completely. So Atom has been around for several years, and there have been lots of external influences that have impacted the way the bank is going. But I think you need to not lose sight of what your end goal is and try and plot your way to that point. At what point do you need to hire more people? What is your strategy around your technology? At what point are you going to build versus buy in terms of the scale of… if it’s a commodity, you’re probably better off buying something because do you really want to focus your engineering resource on building a commodity item versus building something that adds value to your business?

Wiktor Żołnowski: Five innovations.

Simon Dawson: Exactly. So if you work that out, you can plot at the technology/engineering level how you need to build and scale and grow that business. So you really need to ask yourself the question about the build versus buy on the product side, but also what are the business goals and what you need to do to get to the business goals. Sometimes when you look at it, “I’ve got a business plan,” but then you do B-to-A planning, “This is where I want to be, but actually I haven’t worked out how I’m going to achieve that.” So in my experience, it’s better to think about how you’re going to achieve it rather than set these goals, because we in Atom have set goals in the past with the right intent, with as much information as we’ve had at that time, but actually when you get further down the line, you realize those goals were never really realistic. So I think you do need to plot a way to hitting those business goals rather than say, “This is what I want to do within 12 months,” and then think about how you want to do it, which is a common mistake I think we as a bank have experienced.

The other thing is, I think it’s particularly for investor-led companies like Atom, it’s very difficult to change tack and strategy because you obviously have investors who clearly invested money in your business and would like to do things in a certain way, and you may want to do things in another way. So, you know, change is a constant. I think that’s the only thing constant in my eyes: change. But also, don’t just change for change’s sake. I think sometimes we have flip-flopped, and that has created a bit of confusion and slowed us down. It is difficult not to do that, but it’s something to be aware of.

Atom Bank’s future goals

Wiktor Żołnowski: You said that it’s very important to focus on goals, on setting up the goals for a startup. In terms of the goals, what are Atom Bank’s goals right now, or where do you want to see Atom Bank in the next five to ten years?

Simon Dawson: Good question. So I think the main goal for Atom, and this is something we’ve talked about publicly, is an IPO. So I think it’s no secret that we want to float the company, and we want to do that certainly within the next five years. I think ideally within the next two, but a lot of that is not dependent on Atom’s performance. Clearly, that is important, but it depends on the market conditions. I think possibly we would have been closer to that goal than we are if the world economy had not suffered the way it has in the last year, year and a half. So that’s certainly the number one goal. I think the other goal would be to increase our savings balances, increase the number of customers, increase the number of mortgages we provide to our customers, increase the number of business loans. So grow the bank, scale the bank. From a technology point of view, we’ve built the bank to scale. We’re pretty confident we can handle more customers, we can handle more volume. We now need to create the products to get those customers.

Wiktor Żołnowski: I’m happy to see the bank is growing quite fast. So in the next five to ten years, you would like to have a bigger bank?

Simon Dawson: A bigger bank. I think certainly in the next two to three years, the bank will be probably a medium-sized bank in the UK. And I wouldn’t like to see how many customers that would be or the size of the balances and deposits, but I think we’ll be classed as a medium-sized bank.

Wiktor Żołnowski: Cool. It’s actually quite a fast journey since Atom Bank was started in 2014-2015.

Simon Dawson: Well yeah, I think within 10 years, we’ll have gone from nothing to a medium-sized bank.

Wiktor Żołnowski: And possible flotation. It’s awesome.

Simon Dawson: Great.

Working with Pragmatic Coders and NxTide

Wiktor Żołnowski: So you’ve been working for some time with Pragmatic Coders, so actually for our second brand, NxTide, which is more focused on build-operate-transfer for scale-ups. Was there anything that surprised you when you started working with our team?

Simon Dawson: What surprised me the most was actually how easy it was. So obviously, we selected Pragmatic to work with us. We went through a selection process, and you guys won, which is great. And then we started the whole process of, “Well, these are the type of roles we need to fill. So Pragmatic, can you go and find these people and interview them, and then we’ll interview them.” And that was quick. It was really quite quick how we did that. But then the actual onboarding process, which had some teething challenges because it’s not easy to onboard a group of people in Poland into a UK company in which we’d never done that before… We had a few teething challenges, but once we’d overcome those, it was quite smooth and quite quick for the teams to get up to speed and start bonding with other teams. But personally, I’ve been impressed by the quality of the people I’m working with, and I know a lot of my colleagues in the UK feel the same. So we’ve got some really good engineers now who we really rely on. And I think the relationship with Pragmatic is good. So I think it’s been very, very easy working with Pragmatic. I think sometimes in these relationships, you can get caught up in red tape and bureaucracy, and I’d like to think we haven’t done that. It’s been a much more pragmatic, pardon the pun, relationship.

Wiktor Żołnowski: It wasn’t easy not to dive into this bureaucracy, but we’ve managed it together.

Simon Dawson: I think we’ve managed to avoid most of it and focus on what was the real goal, which was actually really quickly building a team which will increase our capability.

Advice on selecting partners

Wiktor Żołnowski: So maybe you have some advice for people who may be looking for such services, as I said, that are focusing on what to build on-site, what to outsource, or what to actually buy somewhere else. So maybe you have some advice for startup founders or people who are managing startups on what to focus on when selecting the partners for such an endeavor and how to select them, what to look for?

Simon Dawson: A big thing for me is cultural fit. So we’ve worked with some big companies, some really big companies. Atom isn’t a huge company, and that hasn’t worked out that well. I’ve worked for some huge companies, so I know how those companies operate. And you need to think around cultural fit. And because where we’ve fallen into the trap of working with some of the bigger companies, the brochures were fantastic, but the actual people that you get to work with… because we’re a smallish company, you’re not getting the real top talent from that company, so the experience is not great. So think about a cultural fit and around what type of skills you are looking for. And does that company who you’re looking at, do they have expertise? Do they have credentials?

A big thing for me is industry credentials. I do a lot of business in the UK with people who I’ve worked with previously. A lot of my team I’ve worked with in other places, and it’s a known quantity. You know what you’re getting, you know that these people can do the job. So when you’re looking at working with third parties, you need to look at what are their credentials, and actually, do they have credentials in the industry that you’re operating in? Because a fintech company working in banking is very different to a technology company providing streaming services. Very different. So even though there may be a technology fit in terms of the skill sets of the people, is there a fit around the environment that they work in? You know, how regulated banking is. So that’s important. It’s really important.

Wiktor Żołnowski: We see this one, since we have a lot of clients from fintech, we see how important it is to actually be aware of some regulations, and sometimes even our clients are not aware of that, so we need to guide them on that. The same with digital health or medtech companies that we are working with. Like, there’s plenty of regulations and some things that cannot be done the same way as, for example, in social media platforms or streaming or whatever or e-commerce.

Simon Dawson: For sure, yeah.

Wiktor Żołnowski: So you see the culture, the size of the company, matters actually.

Simon Dawson: It does, it really does. As I say, I’ve had a few experiences with very large companies working with Atom, and it hasn’t been great. And I think it’s because we were not a large enough company to be as important to get access to the right people.

Wiktor Żołnowski: You also mentioned the credentials. What else, and how to assess it? How to test the potential partner before you start working with them?

Simon Dawson: Our standard, which is probably no different to most places, is we would go out with an RFP-type process where we would ask a number of questions and we’d ask the companies to come provide responses to those questions, and then we would score those independently across the team. But we’d also do a lot of research on who were those companies working for. Has anyone in our business actually worked with them before? Because that counts for a lot as well. And just to try and get a general feel of what if they don’t… because the actual look and feel of the company from a brochure, in terms of the website or whatever or their social media comms, versus what they actually delivered is important. Have they got a reputation for delivery? Because ultimately, when you’re working with a partner, you want them to deliver something for you. It’s important to try and look beyond the veneer and see what actually they have done.

Wiktor Żołnowski: At the end of the day, you are paying for delivering value.

Simon Dawson: Yeah, exactly. And I think we’ve done a good job with Pragmatic because, as I say, I am really happy with what we’ve achieved together. And interestingly, I wasn’t involved in the bid process, so I wasn’t involved in any of the selection. So I came in and managed the relationship once you guys were selected.

Wiktor Żołnowski: I think I went through all questions from my list, and we have a few side topics that we already covered. So Simon, thank you very much for joining us today. I’m pretty sure that what we talked about today will be very beneficial for people who are working with startups right now and anyone who is working on product development, and especially people who are going to scale their business or maybe are already struggling with scaling it. So thank you very much, and I hope we’ll repeat it sometime again.

Simon Dawson: I’m sure we will, Wiktor, and thank you for having me in Kraków. As you know, I always like to come visit you in Kraków.

Wiktor Żołnowski: You’re always welcome here. Thank you very much.

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