Anne Boden addresses the crisis in Starling which created Monzo

In Boden’s new book Banking On It, Starling Bank CEO revealed her version of events that took place back in 2015, which lead to the rise of Tom Blomfield’s Monzo bank.

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An extract from her book was released last week in The Sunday Times and Boden describes how Blomfield, who was the CTO at Bank Possible (previous version of Starling), launched a coup in February 2015.

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“Tom Blomfield, Gary Dolman (who would later become Monzo’s CFO), and Jason Bates (who would later co-found 11:FS) met with Eileen Burbidge and Stefan Glaenzer at Passion Capital and agreed on a deal. Tom made it clear that he was not able to work with me.”

“It was all such a shock. Somehow Tom had taken my place—Passion Capital was in and I was out.”

According to Boden, Blomfield and others pushed for her to take responsibility for all of Starling’s debts, which at the time included more than £1m owed to KPMG and PwC.

Boden has declined this, so Blomfield and the rest departed to start Monzo. However, this left Starling Bank “staff-less, un-investable, and heavily indebted”.

“This was Starling’s near-death experience. At the time, I had no way of knowing if it was one stage further than that. Whichever way I looked at it, I was effectively back at square one,” writes Boden.

Boden’s second book will be published on 5th November by Penguin Business.