rofi e Anne Boden High-f lyer As founder and chief executive of Starling Bank, Anne Boden counts on listening to customers as the bank evolves. She talks about building a new type of bank with Jane Simms T he starling is a sociable, adaptable, friendly and supportive bird. It also works as part of a team to make something as complex as a murmuration a shi ing, swooping wave of sometimes thousands of birds look beautifully simple. It explains why Anne Boden and her team chose the name Starling for the digital bank she established in 2014, but it is also not a bad descriptor of Boden herself the diminutive Welsh woman with the wide smile who took on the big banks with a customerfocused offering based on years close observation of what was wrong with the traditional industry. We meet over Zoom, but her enthusiasm, warmth, integrity and determination to change things for the better shine through. Our conversation begins with her excitement about opening the ardiff office there were already offices in ondon and Southampton) just before lockdown. Carol Vorderman [the TV personality] was coming to the opening ceremony, but we had to cancel it, she says, ruefully. n ebruary, tarling ank launched its first T ad aimed at businesses. It follows the journey of a small business owner sitting in her home office, which takes off, like a helicopter, with the help of the Starling app. As the business gains height, it is struck by lightning, and she wrestles with the controls before breaking through the clouds to safety, accompanied by the end line tarling ank helping business fly. The ad was prescient. Unbelievable though it may seem now, few of us anticipated the bolt from the blue, and associated turbulence, represented by the global pandemic. Starling has kept the implicit promise in its ad: it has lent almost 790m to small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) under the government-backed oronavirus usiness nterruption oan cheme and ounce ack oan cheme. career banker oining loyds ank as a graduate trainee in and, most recently, chief operating officer for llied rish Banks), Boden was determined to put customers front and centre of Starling from the outset. That meant no hidden fees or charges, 24/7 customer service, no or low charges on overseas card spending and ATM withdrawals, and features that allow customers to stay in control, such as being able to freeze your card if you lose it. Starling was already doing well before the current crisis. By the end of its financial year in ovember , , retail accounts and 82,000 business and sole-trader accounts had been opened, and the bank held a little more than 1bn on deposit. By August 2020, those account numbers had risen to more than 1.25m and almost 200,000 respectively plus almost 90,000 euro and US dollar accounts and Starling held more than 3bn on deposit. Across its range, the bank is adding a new account every 35 seconds, making it the fastest-growing SME bank in Europe. hile competitors have been furloughing or laying off staff, cutting executive pay, closing business lines and setting aside huge sums to cover expected losses, Starling has been hiring, raising money (more than 100m from existing investors this year) and continuing to develop new product lines. Whats the secret of its success? We are a very agile organisation, says Boden, her face breaking into its trademark smile. We are still very entrepreneurial; we see every challenge as an opportunity. We didnt go into lockdown and stop, or just carry on with the products we were already working on. We thought very carefully about what our customers needed and responded accordingly. You have to be relevant at any particular point in time. Firm foundations Unlike many banks, Starling has in-house engineering teams and its own core banking so ware running in the public cloud infrastructure. Boden has been fascinated by technology since she studied computer science at Swansea University, and was frustrated by how clunky the technology was in the banks she worked in and how resistant those organisations were to change. It took a long time to put the things in place that would allow Starling to be the customer focused bank wanted it to be, but its paid off, she says. It meant that, during the crisis, we could dip into our bank of features and pull out the components that we could put together to create a relevant product. For example, Starling launched a second debit card attached to the customers account for use by trusted friends, family or carers, to help those who were self-isolating to get supplies; and cheque imaging, so customers could pay in cheques from home. y the time oden le llied rish when the reputation of banking, rocked by scandals, government bailouts and punitive customer penalties, was at rock bottom she was ashamed to be a banker . nable to fix a system she perceived as broken, she 16 Impact ISSUE 31 20_pp16-19_Profile.indd 16 18/09/2020 11:35