Shutterstock This story was delivered to BI Intelligence " Fintech Briefing " subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here . UK app-only bank Atom launched on iOS in April , and an Android service earlier this month. So far, around 40,000 customers have registered with the bank, but only 2,000 have opened accounts. This could be because the bank currently only offers fixed-term savings accounts — many customers are waiting for a current account, according to a spokesperson from the bank. The current account is expected to arrive soon, but we wondered if a bad user experience was also contributing to the low numbers of accounts opened — so we decided to set one up ourselves. Registering was easy. We registered online, downloaded the app, and then waited for Atom to email us a registration code, which arrived a few days later. Once we had entered the registration code in the app, it auto-populated our name, email, and phone number, and asked us to confirm. Security setup was a frustrating experience. The three-stage process involves creating a six digit passcode, taking a selfie in the app in order to set up facial recognition, and repeating a phrase three times to enable voice recognition. It’s not possible to skip any of these steps. The first two stages were easily completed, but for the third step, Atom thought we were in a "noisy environment" and kept asking us to repeat the phrase, despite our being in a silent conference room. We eventually succeeded after four tries — or 12 repetitions of the phrase. These steps complete, we chose which method of authentication would be used for future logins. Setting up an account was hindered by a poor user experience. The first step is agreeing to Atom’s terms and conditions, […]
