Yahoo Finance Starling Bank CEO on how she switched her 35-year career in banking to starting her own
Anne Boden MBE switched her 35-year career working at some of the world’s biggest banks to start a bank of her own, Starling.
Boden sat down with Yahoo Finance UK for its premium show Global Change Agents with Lianna Brinded 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.
“It’s a very, very big project but you can do it one step at a time,” she said.
“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.”
In the interview, Boden discussed:
What lessons she learned from working at some of the world’s biggest banks
Diversity and inclusion initiatives she has implemented at Starling
International ambitions for herself and the bank
And what she really thinks about Brexit
Global Change Agents with Lianna Brinded explores the stories of some of the most inspirational women across business, tech, and academia. Catch up on all the latest episodes here.
