Starling Bank CEO on how she switched her 35-year career in banking to starting her own

Yahoo Finance has released the next episode of “Global Change Agents with Lianna Brinded,” featuring Starling Bank CEO Anne Boden MBE. Boden sat down with Yahoo Finance UK for its premium show and discussed her incredible career and how she built Starling — one of the UK fintech’s biggest success stories, which has raised more than £230m ($295m) of investment.

Here’s a link to the full interview:

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/starling-bank-ceo-anne-boden-on-how-she-switched-her-35-year-career-in-banking-to-starting-her-own-080005621.html

BODEN ON THE HUMAN IMPACT OF FINANCIAL CRISIS (04:15)

The financial crisis was very, very painful. I was working in ABN, AMRO and RBS.  Mostly in the international organisation during the financial crisis but it wasn’t until I went into Allied Irish Bank post-crisis as chief operating officer that I saw the real impact of the financial crisis on real people.

I’d gone into the bank to do a turnaround to return the bank to profitability and as part of that I had to restructure the bank, make people redundant, talk to customers that had financial difficulties, but the most important transformative experience was actually going out and talking to real customers and small businesses in rural towns in Ireland.

You’d go into a town and you’d meet the businesses and talk to local staff and they’d tell you how the financial crisis and the banks had wrecked their lives.

BODEN ON THE ORIGINAL VISION FOR STARLING BANK (07:25)

“It’s a very, very big project but you can do it one step at a time.”

“I remember coming back to London, and it’s January and it’s raining, and the city was looking very, very dreary. I start going from door-to-door, knocking on the doors of law firms asking them to help me with this project I had — I wanted to start a bank. A bank like no other, based on technology and using technology for customers rather than against them.

“Using data to help people with their financial lives and this was going to be a new technology platform, a brand new banking licence, a new business model that is going to be based on APIs that was going to actually have a marketplace that was going to bring all the things that are happening int tech around the world to banking for the first time.

“And most people thought well, it’s a great idea, but it’ll take a lot of money and will she deliver it? And now five years later we’ve done it.”

“And most people thought well, it’s a great idea, but it’ll take a lot of money and will she deliver it? And now five years later we’ve done it.”

STARLING WILL BE PROFITABLE IN 2020 (13:46)

“Starling is very fortunate in that we are a bank so we can actually take deposits and lend those deposits out so that gives us a profitable path.

So we will be profitable by the end of next year 2020, and that will allow us then to support our growth across the world. We are already talking to the central bank of Ireland about our expansion across Europe.”

“That will happen probably sometime next year and then we will be launching in European countries and then probably the world is our oyster.”

BODEN ON AUDITING ALGORITHMS FOR BIAS (15:48)

“It’s very exciting we are hiring people to work in this space, but you have to be very, very careful. Machine learning and artificial intelligence can be very dangerous and we believe in auditing all our algorithms to ensure that we don’t have bias.

But starling is embracing technology. When I went to the market four or five years ago, I said we were going to build this bank a bank like no other. It’s all about taking technology and new ideas to actually transform banking for the first time and machine learning is part of that story.”

FINTECH STARTUPS ‘TAKING BIG MARKET SHARE FROM THE BIG BOYS’ (20:35)

“We’re all slightly different but the fact that we’re all there means there’s a whole industry of people challenging the status quo.  We can’t do it on our own but with all these various organisations out there, all stirring up their part of the market people are taking us seriously and we are taking big market share from the big boys and that’s what’s important.”

Yahoo Finance are proud to support the 2019 OUTstanding LGBT+ Role Model Lists, which are a powerful reflection of the incredible achievements of LGBT+ people in the business community.

Each year diversity charity INvolve publishes lists showcasing the top 100 LGBT+ Executives, 50 LGBT+ Future Leaders, 50 Ally Executives, and 30 Public Sector LGBT+ Executives. The nominations can be viewed on Yahoo Finance UK  here.