The UK's first app-only bank Atom is to raise £40 million from existing investors ahead of a potential IPO next year.
The fund raising effort comes as the Durham-based bank approaches profitability on the back of robust growth in mortgage and business lending.
Driven by tail-winds from the pandemic, Atom will have grown lending to SMEs on its balance sheet to over £700m by the end of March 2021, a tripling of business loans in the last 12 months.
Simultaneously, Atom is reporting profitable growth in its mortgage portfolio, having already added £362m of mortgages in the second half of its financial year 2020/21. Since its launch, Atom has loaned £2.8bn to UK mortgage customers. The Durham-based lender also confirmed its place in the secondary markets for UK mortgages, issuing a £775m prime mortgage securitisation last year.
In the past year, the bank has also shifted to a cloud-native technolgy platform from Thought Machine and launched a new Instant Saver product that has added £0.6 billion of new deposits to its existing £1.7bn of fixed rate savings.
Asked about the future and the possibility of an IPO for Atom, CEO Mark Mullen says: “We turn to our shareholders for capital as and when we need it to drive growth. Despite it being a difficult environment for all companies that need to raise funding, this capital raise will allow us to continue to progress towards profitability and ever-improving levels of efficiency and engagement. The team retains an IPO as our objective and we’ll take the business there when we and the markets are ready. After the year that’s just gone I’m not going to claim perfect foresight, but we’re looking at the financial year 2022/23 as our IPO target.”