Credit: Paul Grover/The Telegraph
For Anne Boden, the past month has been more than a little hectic.
In the space of a few weeks, the outspoken chief executive of Starling has released an explosive tell-all memoir, kicked off a £200m funding round for the digital bank and reached a landmark point in Starling’s history by finally turning a profit.
But, if things have been busy so far, they look unlikely to quieten down soon. Big lenders are said to be circling Starling, keen to snap up the online-only bank which is eschewing high-street branches and gain access to its 1.9 million customer-base. Over the weekend, The Times reported that both JP Morgan and Lloyds were interested in a takeover.
The banking vetaran has long-stated that she is against the idea, but it may not be a simple question of batting suitors away. Starling’s investors, the reports claimed, may be erring on the side of selling the business.
With such questions weighing over Starling, Boden may be expected to be spikey over the subject. But, speaking over video call from her home in Buckinghamshire, she takes the topic in her stride.
“Look, it would be very unusual if these big banks weren’t looking at us and saying they wish they had us,” the 60-year-old smiles warmly. “We are very successful. We’ve got the best technology in the world. And we are growing very fast and taking market share from the big banks. So I am really not surprised.”
Even though she expects such interest, Boden, who started on the counters of Lloyds Bank in the early Eighties, doesn’t hide the fact that she isn’t keen on the idea of a takeover.
She shies away from asserting that Starling will always remain independent (“the important thing in a start-up is to focus on the immediate future”), but it seems at least in the short-term, Boden will do whatever she can to build up the business herself.
“I’ve always said that I don’t really want to sell to a big bank, and that my sights are on an IPO,” the Welsh entrepreneur says. “It is flattering when you see press reports about interest, but my eye is on the prize of an IPO”.
She says investors in the business have always been “extremely supportive” of her plans, and little has changed on that front.
Anne Boden CV
In fact, Boden’s timeline remains the same — a 2022 IPO still looking the most likely path. “There’s a lot to do before then,” she admits, but she wants to be the one “to take it to the next level”.
The idea of taking a business to "the next level" is one that Boden is thinking about a lot at the moment. It is to be the topic of her next book, which she has already started work on just weeks after the publication of her first, ‘Banking On It’.
In the follow-up, Boden says she’s planning to explore how companies go from mid-size ventures to “great companies”. “That rarely happens. Building a business is not a 5-year project, or a 10-year project, it’s a 15-year project. And I think you have to love what you do.”
If the entrepreneur’s last book is anything to go by, Boden is unlikely to hold back. In ‘Banking On It’, Boden finally revealed details of the rift with her former-protégé, Tom Blomfield, who left Starling to set up a rival fintech company, Monzo.
In the book, she accused Blomfield of engineering a coup to poach colleagues for his rival start-up.
The accusations caused waves across the technology industry, with The Telegraph revealing that one chief executive had disagreed with the account so strongly that they purchased a copy of The Sunday Times newspaper, which featured an extract from the book, in order to burn the page it was on.
But despite this furore, Boden doesn’t regret revealing the details of the rivalry. “At the end of every interview, people would ask me if I could talk about what happened in 2015 [when Blomfield left], and I would say, you know, these things happen at start in startups, and move on to the next topic.
“But, I think it’s important for entrepreneurs to write their story. It would be very false to only put the good stories in, so therefore I had to tell the story. I had a duty to do that.”
The book has only been out a few weeks, but Boden says the feedback has so far been positive. “I’ve had so many people write to me. Actually I’ve had a lot of messages from women saying similar things happened to them.”
It is true that Boden is among the trailblazers for women in technology, this week having won “chief executive of the year” at the Digital Masters Awards, a year in which Boden admits “it has been really difficult being a CEO”.
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This year, more than ever, “you have to be there for people and say perhaps you don’t know what the future holds”.
The latest award comes on top of a host of other accolades for Boden, the daughter of a steelworker and a department store worker, which include an MBE for services to financial technology.
Right now, Boden says Starling has “probably the best technology” in the space. “I usually say in Europe, but I can’t think of anyone in the US who does anything better.”
It is technology which has attracted swathes of customers. Starling recently revealed customer accounts had almost doubled over the past year, with a demographic that is different to other digital banks.
“They are slightly older and a bit more affluent.” It is partly because of this she thinks Starling has been able to become profitable whilst others haven’t, posting a £800,000 profit for October and “expected to be profitable every single month from now on”.
“At Starling our customers have high balances and use us as their main account. We’re much more like Barclays from a customer profile point of view.” Although, she adds quickly, “we’re nothing like Barclays when it comes to customer service”. “We believe in being there for our customers,” she says pointedly.
It is fair to say that Boden sees Starling as vastly different to its incumbent rivals, a business which is at the forefront of this shift among older customers to digital banks, and which she hopes to keep separate.
But established lenders seem more keen than ever to bridge that gap. Boden may be set on taking Starling to the next level. The question is whether anything will stand in the way of that.
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