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Looking out of the new offices of online bank Starling, Anne Boden sees the familiar, unassuming surroundings of the Welsh capital, Cardiff, rather than the skyscrapers of London’s financial district, the City.
“We have great universities in Cardiff and we have great talent here, we use that talent to create something really special for clients,” says Boden.
Boden is the head of Starling, which has just opened its Cardiff facility, where around half of its 1,800 employees will be based.
With nearly three million customers and an eight percent market share in UK business banking, Starling has managed to carve out a niche in the highly competitive world of fintech and, unlike many of its competitors, is making a profit.
Born into a modest family 43 miles from Cardiff in Swansea, where she also studied, Boden calls the bank she founded in 2014 “a force to be reckoned with”.
The same description could apply to Boden, who regularly describes herself as a “five foot (1.5 metres) Welsh woman”.
In the very masculine world of finance, she defends the position of female business leaders and has been put in charge of a government study group on the subject.
“I’m not a typical banker,” says Boden, who wants to offer her customers a different experience than the traditional banks she worked for until 2013.
But after the financial crisis of 2008, the former Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) employee had to distinguish herself from all the other entrepreneurs who wanted to break out of the old world of finance.
More than 50 years old, Boden teamed up with Tom Blomfield, a recent Oxford University graduate who typifies the London startup world.
But in 2015, just months before launch, Blomfield jumped overboard with much of Starling’s management team to launch rival bank Monzo.
In her autobiography, Boden writes about her struggle to maintain control of Starling and her vision: a profitable but “responsible” online bank with world-class customer service that respects the environment.
Starling says it uses only renewable energy and recycled plastic.
The bank’s £2 billion ($2.5 billion) market cap lags far behind Revolut ($33 billion) or Monzo ($4.5 billion) but often beats its peers in customer satisfaction.
– ‘No crypto gimmicks’ –
“It’s a friendly rivalry, I think,” Boden says of her relationship today with the big names in UK fintech, but doesn’t shy away from criticizing them and praising Starling’s more cautious approach.
In her book Banking On It: How I Disrupted an Industry, she describes the arduous task of getting Starling a banking license — the holy grail that allows a bank to use customer deposits to make loans — that sets Starling apart from some its competitors in the UK.
Fintech giant Revolut, while not recognized as a bank in the UK, has that status in several other European countries, and its efforts to obtain a license are regularly reported in the financial press.
Without the license, banking startups struggle to turn a profit.
“Some of these new fintechs are trying to find ways to monetize their customer base and are building trading apps or crypto to generate revenue,” she says.
“We’re not looking for gimmicks, just what the customers really want.”
She does not answer questions about a possible IPO, which was initially planned for the end of the year or early 2023, but Boden is happy to discuss the future of the bank.
“If I look forward to five years, people will be talking about Starling as this global technology company that owns a very successful bank in the UK and it all started here in Cardiff,” she says.
“We’re moving towards a future where technology is everywhere and things are happening all around you that banks need to respond to,” she says.
“Instead of paying your insurance bill quarterly, maybe you pay by the minute. Maybe you pay for your self-driving car while driving yourself down the street.”
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