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The co-founder of the UK’s Metro Bank and Atom Bank is planning to raise £500mn over the next five years to build a new lender with a £10bn balance sheet to cater to family offices and high net-worth individuals.
Anthony Thomson, who co-founded Metro with Vernon Hill in 2010 and set up Atom three years later, told the Financial Times he was seeking to raise £100mn for his venture in an initial fundraising round that will kick off this week.
To be named Family Offices Bank, the executive team will include former Virgin Money and TSB chief Paul Pester, Barclays veteran Samantha Bamert and Stuart Grimshaw, a former executive at Commonwealth Bank of Australia. The founding executive team members will hold equity in the business.
Metro Bank, which was the first new high street bank to open in the UK in more than a century, promised to be more customer-friendly than incumbents. But, like other challengers, it has failed to take significant market share from the UK’s biggest banks, which continue to dominate.
Thomson later launched Atom Bank in 2013, followed by :86 400 — an Australian neobank that was bought by National Australia Bank within two years of its inception in 2019.
The 71-year-old entrepreneur’s latest venture, which is yet to get a banking licence, is designed to serve family offices that feel underserved by traditional banks, which he said often enticed the investment managers with promises of rapid service and access to deals but instead pitched products that did not meet their needs.
“Family offices and ultra-high net worth individuals are increasingly frustrated with the service they receive from their banks,” Thomson said. “Family offices’ needs have evolved over recent years, yet existing banks have become painfully slow or unable to meet these needs, and they show little interest in serving the requirements of individual family members.”
The bank plans to raise cash exclusively from family offices and high net-worth individuals, who will become the lender’s first clients and collectively own the bank. Thomson said this would allow the business to be run in the interests of its customers, who would be able to collect dividends in profitable years but could count on the bank not to be listed or sold.
Family Offices Bank was expecting to launch in late 2026 and deciding between Jersey, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates for its headquarters, Thomson said. It is talking to authorities in each of the jurisdictions, and will announce a location later this year.
Thomson said he had already had “several formal approaches” from potential investors. He said that by operating a smaller business the bank would be “unshackled from legacy [IT] systems and traditional organisational structures”, and allow it to invest heavily in artificial intelligence. This would be used to better detect fraud and money laundering, he said.
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