Atom Bank’s Mark Mullen: Startups are hard, but ‘a lot less soul destroying than
Mark Mullen has had “the week from hell”.
The business he co-founded and now runs, British savings challenger Atom Bank, just closed a £40m investment round at a lower valuation than previous fundraising efforts. On top of that, there were governance meetings and preparations to file the bank’s annual capital adequacy report.
“There’s this myth that somehow or other, you call all the shots — it’s just rubbish,” Mullen says of running a startup, speaking over a video call from his home about an hour’s drive from Atom’s Durham headquarters. “I’ve still got a board, I’m answerable to my investors. There’s always a boss.”
“The difference is you’re much more personally accountable. I don’t think it suits everybody, because it’s a bit scary or there’s no safety net. But it’s a blast. It’s not boring.”
The last 12 months have been stressful for everyone, but particularly hard felt in fintech as startup founders like Monzo’s Tom Blomfield caved under the pressure of narrowing balance sheets, demanding investors and increasing regulatory oversight. Mullen, who launched Atom Bank in 2014, earlier outlined the bank’s listing strategy with Financial News.
“Bankers, God love us, are a bit of an odd breed, let’s be honest,” says Mullen. “The nature of the job is very stressful at times. Nobody finds success stressful. It’s when things are going wrong and you’re forced to compromise, that’s when it gets stressful — and of course Covid-19 added an extra layer of uncertainty to it.”
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It’s been a year of the pandemic, but the Irish banking veteran has continued to eschew a home office setup — propping up his laptop on a small table in front of an uncomfortable-looking bucket armchair for our conversation. He commutes into the office two or three days a week to get a change of scene.
“I can’t imagine that this is the future of work for me,” Mullen says. “My desk is about as ergonomic as toffee.”
After graduating from reading history at Trinity College in Dublin in 1989, Mullen “stuck a pin in a page” and started his banking journey at Forward Trust Group in Birmingham, a specialist finance house of Midland Bank Group that was later absorbed into HSBC.
In 2000 he moved to London as a manager of one of HSBC’s earliest internet banking projects, which morphed into a head of marketing role at the bank’s digital challenger brand First Direct. Following a brief stint as HSBC’s regional head of marketing for the Middle East and North Africa in 2009, Mullen was made First Direct’s chief executive in 2011.
First Direct was a notable experience, he says, because it was founded as a telephone bank in 1989.
“Running it was a gift of a job, it’s got great people, it had great customer reputation, but it was — and still is, in my view — under invested in and falling behind.”
When Mullen took up the mantle, the average age of a First Direct customer was 37. To compete for a younger market, Mullen spearheaded a brand overhaul.
“I worked pretty hard to redefine the strategy, and I didn’t follow it through because my budget was cut as part of one of HSBC’s never-ending series of strategic reviews,” he says. “They were basically applying the latest cost-cutting, containment, swingeing cuts, and I kind of thought, well it’s just not going to happen.”
“I thought I’m going to timeout here, and it’s not enough. So it doesn’t matter how good it was. In the end, if I couldn’t get the investment to transform it, there wasn’t enough in it for me.”
It was serendipitous, then, that Mullen had recently met Atom Bank co-founder Anthony Thomson at a mutual friend’s 50th birthday party in Tunbridge Wells. Thomson wanted to set up a new branch-based bank in northeast England, while Mullen favoured a mobile-first model. In the end, Mullen won that argument.
The duo initially…
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