Rana Bhattacharya - CTO, Atom Bank plc

What's your proudest work-related achievement of the last 12 months?
We are creating the most customer-centric bank on the planet. Our TrustPilot, Reevoo and NPS scores all point to the successes we have already had, but we are restless in our ambition to be the best. So last year we started a journey to re-platform the bank to the cloud including introducing Thought Machine's next -generation cloud-native and smart contract-based core banking platform. By moving to the cloud and leveraging Thought Machine, Atom will be faster, more agile and able to configure banking products with unparalleled speed. Being part of the team bringing this change forward is a significant achievement and privilege.
What's the number one skill today's IT leaders need?
From personal experience, IT leaders need so much more than an impressive skill set. It's about resilience, flexibility and perseverance to get initiatives finished, even when they are very difficult and you don't have all the resources at your disposal that you would like.
How many people work in IT in your organisation?
We have about 90 full-time people working in technology, across areas such as Architecture, change delivery, engineering, testing, security, service delivery and data management.
What's your top priority for the next 12 months?
My top priority is to go live this year with our next general banking platform on the cloud, in order to enable Atom's vision of being the most customer-centric bank on the planet to be realised.
What's your annual IT budget?
Confidential.
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