Atom Bank and Newcastle University have set aside three years to conduct research on trust in financial services and how companies can design better digital banking services.

The UK’s first bank built exclusively for smartphones and tablets is embarking on a million-pound project with computer science, psychology and banking experts to understand why customers distrust technology. 

Dubbed ‘FinTrust’, the initiative is also attempting to find parallels between behavioural sciences and digital design to bring Open Banking into focus and answer questions under an analytical framework. 

The FinTrust project is funded by a £1.2m grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council as part of an £11 million campaign to support research in areas that present challenges in accessing and using personal data.

Atom bank’s blockchain and crypto-statistics project is one of two Knowledge Transfer Projects that Atom is engaged in, funded by Innovate UK and managed by the Knowledge Transfer Network.

Edward Twiddy, chief innovation officer at Atom Bank, says: “Atom will use the outputs from the research to inform and improve the design of future innovative products and services. One of the first applications of the research will be in the development of our blockchain to build better mortgages, a major innovation project drawing on blockchain expertise from Newcastle University’s Computer Science department and crypto-statisticians at the Durham University’s Department of Mathematical Sciences.”