It's cake and candle time for our app

Happy birthday to us! As of April our Atom bank app is officially one year old

So as we hit another milestone for our business, we’re reflecting on what we’ve achieved here at Atom bank and how we’re building our shiny Atom bank brand. I’m eight months into the wonderful experience that is Atom bank life, and my first blog will be unapologetically sprinkled with numbers and reflections – just not those you’d expect from a bank. Because we’re Atom bank.

How did we get to where we are today? Well, I’ve got a small clique of other brands that I admire, and as a result, I tend never to look beyond them – despite their competitors’ best efforts. The brands I’ve fallen for all have a very clear purpose, mission and belief about the role they play in customers’ lives. Let’s take Spotify’s mission for example: giving people access to millions of songs, all the time. Simple, aspirational, challenging.

In days gone by companies broadcast messages about how their product was different by using ‘attractive’ images. These days the brands that succeed set out to simply nail their customers’ experience, then if it’s done successfully, the commercial benefits will follow.

Building a bank from scratch - and doing it all in an app - means thinking hard about how expectations set by brands that have reached the rarest of achievements - becoming a verb. “To Airbnb it”, “to Uber over to you”, “to Spotify that song”.

And yes, you guessed it, these are the brands that started out life without broadcast messaging. Instead, the power of word of mouth combined with PR fuelled their initial growth. Understanding the seamless and digital experiences created by this new wave of brands was fundamental to the birth of our app a whole year ago. We want to breathe new life into banking – and be flexible and agile while we’re doing it. We hope one day we can all “Atom bank our money”.

Our first year in numbers

And just a reminder, we’d love to hear from you so why not join our Digital Mortgages Partner Panel. It’s your chance to tell us whether you think we're way off mark, or that we're hitting the bulls-eye. We want your thoughts. Your opinions.