Mobile Bank Leader Disses Traditional Banks’ Digital Efforts

Lipstick on a pig. That was the descriptor Anthony Thomson, chairman of the U.K.’s digitally focused Atom Bank, had for his High Street rivals’ attempts to keep up with the digital banking revolution.

Atom launches next month, and Thomson believes it will be one of the brands that will inevitably disrupt the big banks right out of business.

“Just because traditional banks exist today, it doesn’t give them the God-given right to be here tomorrow,” he noted at a London conference. “They won’t be. Uber have cut off the legs of black taxi drivers. The hotel industry is being decimated by Airbnb. These new business models are changing the world.”

Consultants at McKinsey have predicted that banks could see a two-thirds loss of revenue on some services that will be supplied by non-bank FinServ tech firms in the future.

Thomson further noted that banks’ efforts to be “cool and hip” with slick mobile apps and efficient digital customer-facing services were doomed to failure because they are buttressed on the back end by archaic technology. The coming death, it seems, will be by a thousand cuts. Big, bloated banks are impenetrable to new tech because of established clunky legacy systems, whereas startups are quick and can laser in and focus on chipping away at the banks’ total service portfolio.

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