Digital bank Atom raises £25m to fund biometric development

High profile investors, including Jon Moulton, Jim O’Neill and Sir Peter Vardy, invested in challenger bank Atom yesterday. Their involvement brings the total equity invested so far to £25m. Neil Woodford’s CF Woodford Equity Income Fund is the biggest new shareholder.

 

 

Some of the money will be spent on creating new technologies for the digital bank. “We are putting massive investment into doing things we think are really innovative,” Atom founder Anthony Thomson told City A.M.

 

“This is principally on customer identification and the use of biometrics – fingerprints, voice, facial recognition, iris recognition.”

 

 

Once the bank receives full authorisation from the regulators in early- to mid-2015, Atom will embark on another fundraising round to bring in the necessary regulatory capital to operate. It intends to offer a full retail banking service digitally, predominantly through mobile apps.