Founder of challenger bank Starling mulls Northern office

Starling, the challenger bank founded in 2014, is potentially eyeing up Manchester and Leeds as options for a North of England office.

Its founder and CEO Anne Boden said the bank was keen to grow its services and talent across all regions and this could mean a Northern office in the next two years.

The bank, the first of the challengers to make a profit last year, has seen huge growth in both its personal and retail customers across the UK.

In the North West personal customer account numbers climbed 39% in the last year to 244,795 with 35% growth in business accounts to 46,862.

In Yorkshire it experienced a 42% rise in personal accounts to 168,622 and 38% increase in business accounts to 30,344.

It now has a 7.5% share of the SME market and with a growing customer base across the North, Boden pointed out that fintech and new banks was not just for London and Shoreditch but it’s about doing “practical things for customers everywhere.”

“The big question is, will we have a site in Manchester or Leeds in the future,” she said.

“We haven’t decided that, but we are growing very, very fast and it’s very important that we can tap into as much talent as possible.

“At the moment, there is probably a 50/50 chance that we’ll do something in the next two years.”

She added: “Starling is different to other banks in that people reach out to us, they love the product, they love the ethos of the firm and want to be involved but they don’t live near one of our offices and so encourage us to open offices elsewhere.

“However, we need critical mass. We open offices where we think there is talent and where we can draw on the local communities. Where we have opened offices in Cardiff and Southampton have been successful and are growing.”

Boden founded Starling in 2014 after she became fed up with Britain’s ‘broken banking system’ following a 30-year career with several banking heavyweights including Allied Irish Banks, Royal Bank of Scotland, and ABN AMRO.

So, she decided to launch her own bank with technology created here in the UK.

She said: “When I started Starling, I was really frustrated with the existing banking systems.

“Every other industry had changed, and the banking industry was still using technology from the ark.

“So, the one important thing about Starling is that we built our technology for ourselves and we now use those technologies to support all our customers. We are also working on launching that technology as an offering to other banks around the world.”

Recalling the early days of starting a bank, Boden said she went ‘knocking on everyone’s doors’ to get financial backing for the business.

“I was on my own with a Twitter account, knocking on doors for finance and, you know, in the early years, it was so important to get exposure and get credibility.”

She said as a woman trying to raise finance she understood the challenges female founders faced when it came to accessing the same.

“That’s the one big hurdle that they all have issues with is trying to raise the finance to actually start a business or get to the next stage of when they grow their businesses,” said Boden.

“So, only 1% of venture capital goes to women. But the vast majority of women don’t need venture capital. What they need is other forms of finance.

“It is harder for women. It took me many years to raise the finances to start Starling and even I thought it was going to be much easier.

“But you must be resilient. The great thing about women is that they have great ideas and a huge amount of ability to get things done. But unfortunately, they are told to go away more than men.

“I am a five-foot-tall Welsh woman who went knocking on doors trying to raise hundreds of millions. Nobody believed me. I did twice as many meetings as the men and I kept on and on and on asking more and more and pushing and pushing and eventually, I got the funding to start building the best bank in the world.”

She added: “It is harder for women but be persistent and reach out to as many networks as you can. It can be done. And we will have those great businesses because we deserve them.”

Boden also revealed that Starling Bank has stopped all paid advertising on Facebook and Instagram until parent company Meta starts checking that financial services adverts are from FCA authorised firms, as it has promised it will do.

“We want to protect our customers and our brand integrity,” she said.

“We believe that it is wrong to take money from fraudsters for ads that they’re placing on their platforms because one of the big threats we have to society today is that there are so many fraudsters out there scamming customers, enticing them to give their hard-earned cash away.

“At the moment we don’t think Meta is doing enough to ensure that fraudsters do not advertise on their platform.”