Interviews with Leaders in Fintech & Web3 · 2026-06-15 · 52 min
Today's guest is Mark Mullen, co-founder and CEO of Atom Bank, the UK's first app-based bank and the first digital challenger to win a full UK banking licence. Mark is a self-described accidental banker who read history at university, spent 24 years inside HSBC Group, and ran First Direct, one of the most innovative banks of its era. Then, in his mid-40s, he walked away from a comfortable seat at the top of the industry to build a bank from scratch in the Northeast of England, not London. He has watched telephone banking, internet banking and mobile banking come and go, and now sits inside the AI wave trying to work out what it actually changes and what it does not. This conversation goes past the technology and into the things that endure: trust, people, and why the UK banking sector is still far less disrupted than everyone assumes.
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