Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Welcome to the brand new season of Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss. Jazz Shapers is where I bring you the pioneers, the risk takers, the problem solvers shaping the business world together with the musicians shaping the worlds of jazz, soul and blues. My guest today, launching our new season with a real change-maker, is Anne Boden MBE, Founder and CEO of Starling Bank, a leading UK digital consumer bank. After a career at the pinnacle of some of the worlds’ top banks, Anne became disillusioned in the aftermath of the financial crash. Banking, she felt, was stuck in the past and someone needed to start a new bank, putting the power back into the hands of the consumer. Anne decided that that someone was her. Having already experienced intrenched sexism in the industry, Anne, then aged 54, and without entrepreneurial experience, faced new forms of prejudice and doubt but despite severe setbacks, she built a team and new technology and launched Starling in May 2014, becoming the first woman in the UK to start her own bank. Starling Bank now offers personal, small business, joint and children’s banking services in use in almost three million accounts across the UK and Anne sits on the Business Advisory Councils of both the Prime Minister and the Mayor of London. Anne Boden is my Business Shaper and it’s lovely to have you here on this, the very first episode in the new season. I’ve read your book.
Anne Boden
Ooh thank you.
Elliot Moss
That’s, your welcome. ‘Banking On It’ by Anne Boden, published I think first in 2020 and then republished…?
Anne Boden
Yes, came out in the pandemic, yes, yes.
Elliot Moss
In the pandemic. I want to start with this line because it struck me, having read the whole thing and it’s right at the end and it’s in the acknowledgements actually, and I kind of think this is at the heart of what I want to discuss with you today. “And finally,” you write, “to the person who first said to me, ‘It can’t be done.’ Thank you. I do respond well to a challenge.”
Anne Boden
Yes.
Elliot Moss
Why does Anne Boden respond well to a challenge?
Anne Boden
I think I like to prove that it is possible that I can do it. You can, as stereotypes, you can change the world. I find it exciting and people have told me throughout my, my childhood, my early career, that it couldn’t be done and I couldn’t do it and yes, I do like a challenge.
Elliot Moss
And having read the book and having, you know, done my usual research, that’s completely clear from a very early age. And in corporate life, actually in some ways it’s tough in a different way to assert yourself and especially as a young woman in the banking world, which you were in a graduate trainee way back in the early eighties I think, at Lloyds, and all those other big roles that you’ve had, senior roles. Was that just blind prejudice that you were a woman and that you couldn’t be, I mean was it as simple as that or was there other stuff cooking? Was it the fact that you were from Wales? Was it, I mean I’m trying to get under the skin of why it felt like you were being undermined or challenged as it was in the sense of being able to deliver whatever it was you were meant to have been delivering.
Anne Boden
When you are going through these times, you don’t think there’s anything unusual going on. When I was a new graduate in Lloyd’s Bank in the early eighties, starting my career in banking and technology, I thought this is how the world works, I didn’t realise that in some respects, the odds were stacked against me. I didn’t really take on board all the various issues that made me different. It’s only now, in as looking back that I can see that some of the frustrations of the time weren’t my fault, it was the system. I’ve had a great career, I’m having a great career, I’m having the time of my life and looking back, I really, really enjoyed the journey but I was a, you know, 21 year old, coming to London for the first time, in a big job, I think I was earning more than my father on my very, very first day in my first job, and my father was, you know had a semi-trade sort of job in a manufacturing and tr… in the steel industry. My mother was working in the, in a department store and it was a big thing me getting a degree, it was a big thing with me coming back to London and I was taking on many other sort of challenges, you know I was a woman, in banking, in tech and I was a computer science graduate and they don’t look like me. And that is one of the first challenges that you get to grips with but at the time, did I think I was disadvantaged in any way? Did I think I was discriminated against because I was a woman or whatever? No, I didn’t. I thought life was going to be fair and I was going to work very hard and get as far as I could. It’s only looking back now that I see that life was different.
Elliot Moss
That work ethic, you mentioned your mother and your father, I imagine they worked really hard and I imagine you saw that every day. Was that the main influence for Anne Boden in terms of her work ethic or does it come from somewhere else because again, if I’m reading between the lines, and I look and having had clients in my old world from advertising that were banks, building societies, it’s unbelievably hard to manage a bank that’s set up, it’s even harder, infinitesimally, to open a new one. That requires someone who isn’t just going to work. That requires someone who is on a mission. Where does that come from?
Anne Boden
Looking back at my parents, my parents, yes, they worked hard but they worked hard for a reason. They worked hard in order to, for us to have fun, you know, it was a very happy household, you know we, you know my father used to come home at 4.00 o’clock in the afternoon, pick me up from school, pick my mother up from work and we’d go down the beach, you know, that was the sort of family we were, we had great holidays, you know you worked in order to have holidays, you worked in order to spend time with each other and have fun. It was very, it wasn’t a serious household. I learned to read by reading holiday brochures, you know, that was the sort of home it was and we realised that we were very, very fortunate. We were a little bit more affluent because my parents worked hard than the people surrounding us and therefore, we knew very well that we had an advantage and we enjoyed that and we had a great time and we realised that life and fun is quite precious.
Elliot Moss
But you worked so hard, I mean you talk about in the book, you know, and you talk about, listen, they may have been discriminating against me and they may have gone down the pub and avoided me but frankly, I just put in more hours, I carried on going, I had tasks to do, they ended up working for me anyway because I was, I worked so hard and I was clear what needed to be done. In a way, I don’t know, that, does your joy come more from all the work you do because obviously you know you talk about “At 4 o’clock dad gets home” but by your own admission, work is your love, I mean you enjoy it and that’s, and you embrace it so?
Anne Boden
Yeah, good point. I must admit that when my dad came home at 4 o’clock, we did go to the beach with all my books from school but it was very much, I think I get a lot of pleasure from work. I think we have not everybody is as fortunate as we are, you know, sitting in this studio today, we are doing a great job, we go back into our offices and we have interesting people around us, interesting conversations, we can take part in life, we can read newspapers and listen to music, we have rich lives. It’s not like that for everyone. Work, for some people, is completely drudgery and I think that we have to consider that. I can work all these hours and throw myself into it because it’s intellectually challenging, I make the opportunities for our customers and for our employees and it’s fun. I can’t complain about what I do.
Elliot Moss
And she’s not complaining, to be clear. The bright blue eyes are looking at me and they’re not complaining, they look very happy. We’ve much more coming up from my Business Shaper, it’s Anne Boden, she’s the Founder and CEO of Starling Bank. Right now though, we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions, they can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Mishcon de Reya’s Victoria Pigott and Dr Rebecca Newton, Organisational Psychologist and CEO of Coach Advisor, discuss the impact of women in positions of leadership and on boards.
You can revel in all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast – it sounds almost rude – and indeed you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice. But back to today’s guest, the main event, it’s Anne Boden, my first of the season here on Jazz Shapers, Founder and CEO of Starling Bank, a leading UK digital consumer bank. So, there you are, you are going to set your own bank up. The first time that you said it loud was to yourself or was it to somebody else who happened to be in the room?
Anne Boden
I was on holiday in South Africa in early 2014 and I had decided to quit my job to start a bank and somebody asked me what I did for a living. I said I was starting a bank and I felt so silly, stupid, arrogant, pompous but people don’t start banks and I shocked myself and as I, as I said it more, as I got used to the idea, it became more real. Yes, I was starting a bank. I realised that the banking industry had lost its way, it was doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons and somebody should be brave enough to start a bank and it took me a while to realise that I also wanted to do something new and it could be me that started that bank. I felt, I felt as if I wasn’t big enough, important enough to make that bold move but the more I said it, the more I actually got into difficult situations where people said what are you doing and I was responding, I’m going to start a bank like no other. It all became much more real. Also, I couldn’t go back, you know, I couldn’t go back to my old world once I’d come out of that. I couldn’t go back to the people that felt believed the old things. There was no going back, I had to make it work.
Elliot Moss
And making it work of course is the combination of both the vision, like it’s going to have this kind of technology, it’s going to be this kind of seamless user experience, that’s what’s going to go on, I’m not going to have branches, I am going to make money on the current account even the folklore in the industry is, you don’t. All those things but it’s also about people so, on the one hand I look at your life and I go wow, she’s a brainy, she’s got it, she knows what to do, she’s got 25 years in the fintech, because before it was called fintech, right?
Anne Boden
Yep.
Elliot Moss
She’s got all that. She’s got these key people in her life as they go and, in the book, it comes out the Alan Chandler story, the fellow who came and sat there and never seemed to leave, the Harold McBride fellow who said no, it’s not £3 million is £48 million, there are these people there. How do you balance the two? One is the rational part of Anne’s brain and the other one is a really emotional part. How do you make sure they work really beautifully together?
Anne Boden
People took a risk on me. I, you know, went through the ups and downs of starting a bank and when I really needed people to make commitments to the vision, they made that decision. Alan Chandler, who is you know sort of with us today and I’ve just been speaking to him a couple of hours ago, turned up to give me a hand and stayed ten months without earning a single penny because he believed in the vision and he believed that we could pull it off. The issue was, so many people backed me along the way, I couldn’t back out of this, it was so important, people had committed their time, their effort, set aside things they wanted to do with a vision of creating a new back so I had to succeed, we had to succeed and yes, you know sort of seven years later, we are I hope a very important bank in the UK but from the first statement, ‘I’m going to start a bank’ to people saying that they were going to give up and deprioritise other things in their life to support me, there was no going back, this thing had to succeed and we were going to be a success and we were going to deliver what we needed to, to customers, which I felt had been really let down by the financial system.
Elliot Moss
There’s a, there’s an economist, Joseph Schumpeter, who talks about creative destruction and famous in the fifties, he’s one of my favourite economists because I just like the idea of tearing things down the whole time. Here we are seven, eight years later, are you still tearing things down? Are you still looking for the perfect experience for someone who had, you know, a person in the banking world, is that still your driver?
Anne Boden
Yeah, I think we’re just starting. I think what we have now is that we represent about 50%, half the market share of Barclays in small business banking, we have about 3% of market share in retail banking. We have all the features and functions, plus lots more of the entry stakes to providing great customer service. One of the things I, I love doing and perhaps I should admit it, is that the Competition and Markets Authority, every six months does a survey of customers in which they ask them all about the products and they rank the banks and all the banks have to put in their branches and on their websites, the order, the ranking order of how, how good banks are in serving their customers. I love going into Barclays or HSBC or Lloyds and seeing something on the wall, a list on the wall, and Starlings on the top. I can’t take a photograph because it’s probably not, you know, you can do that for security reasons but we’re there, we’re part of that group of banks now that serves customers. The next stage is to go the next level, to figure out how we can really help customers with their financial lives. We’ve entered the market, we have market share, we’re doing a great service, we’re rated very highly, now we are starting. We won a licence, you know back in 2016, we won a licence from the regulator to operate a bank. Now we have the licence from our customers to help them take things to the next level and we’re spending a lot of our time now working with groups of customers figuring out what we can do to help them you know in this very, very difficult times. Technology is really, really exciting. Technology is changing so fast. What can we do to figure how we can help customers, keep them safe and take some of the stress away from managing their money. So, yeah, we’re starting and there’s a whole range of things now we’re starting to experiment with.
Elliot Moss
I was going to say and because the challenge now in a way is to not be conventional because now you are in that set and you’ve literally got the licence and you’ve got the licence because you trust and trust is the key thing in all of this. You can’t slip into all the folklore that you, yourself was saying but that’s just folklore, how do you ensure that you do that?
Anne Boden
I think actually having contact with real customers. Customers still email me, contact me, I answer their queries, sometimes on Twitter, on social media, some of those questions are I feel as if we’ve let customers down and I need to do something to fix it, sometimes customers need features or functions that we need to work on but surprisingly it’s surprisingly difficult at Starling to separate yourself from customers because we all want to do it, we all want to listen to customers, we all want to talk to people that are talking to customers. One of the most difficult jobs I think in Starling are the people who talk to our customers 24 by 7. We’re available on Chat or on the telephone, you know 24 by 7, every day of the year and some of those conversations, my hat goes off to the people having them. We’ve got people on the other end of the line, you know perhaps want help and assistance in a difficult spot, some of them are having a great time, they are on holiday and want some support, some of them are going through difficult family times but we have people on the end of the line that show empathy and that is very, very important to us, being able to show empathy to customers and I think that’s what differentiates us. I want to be the best technology bank, where we are offering the best technology to customers but I want us to have a heart and talk to customers and that is because it is really, really difficult to do that, it is so easy for big organisations to put a barrier between them and the customer, to let somebody else deal with the pain the customers are going through, I think we all at Starling believe that that’s what keeps us honest, that’s what keeps us really thinking about what we can do to make things better.
Elliot Moss
Final chat coming up with Anne Boden, my guest today, and we’ve got some music from Snarky Puppy’s latest album too, that’s all in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Anne Boden has been my very precise and very open Business Shaper today, she’s the Founder and CEO of Starling Bank. In all the things you say, Anne, and the story and all that, there’s a lot of emotion in there and you talked about empathy, just before, with regard to treating people, just as humans right, who happen to be bank, happen to be banking, your customers, how have you managed to manage your own emotions through all of this, you know you talk about when you began as a trainee and then you moved through to these senior roles and then you stopped and you start again and then through the book, you talk about just how difficult it was and some of the fallouts and stuff from, at the beginning of the business and even, and even recently, there’s been some stuff in the press. How does Anne Boden manage when she’s privately there, on her own, in a room, thinking about stuff? How do you ensure that it doesn’t turn into anything too negative? Because it strikes me again you are very resilient but you are more than that, you are joyful about what you do but there must be those dark moments.
Anne Boden
I think you have to be very rational about what we do and how it compares to other people’s lives and other people’s experiences. Lots of things have gone very right for me and very right for the people that I work with. You know, we all have jobs, we are all able to spend time with people we like, doing interesting things. Yeah, things will go wrong but that is, that is what we’re paid for. I am extremely privileged to be a founder and CEO of a successful bank, that’s a privilege and you know going with that means that there are times that are going to be tough, there are times where we are going to be criticised, there are times that we could have done a better job, there are times when we could have served our customers better. We need to take those and take them as criticism to do a better job and you get better. I am fortunate and the people around us also can celebrate having built a very successful bank. We have nothing to be, it’s relative, lots of people at this time are really suffering, we’ve got people that can’t pay their electricity bills and their energy bills. The people that work for Starling, the financial services industry, the people in jobs, that are managing to pay their bills, can consider you know their position against others. I think that the financial services industry and founders in the tech industry need to appreciate how success is fun and not always complain about it.
Elliot Moss
Just one final thing before I ask you your song choice, you were described in a recent FT interview that when you had lunch with Patrick Jenkins, I think it was, as an iconoclastic, you know, as an iconoclast basically, for anyone thinking about doing their own thing that’s different now, challenging the convention of a category, what would you say to them? What kind of motivational thing would you say to that individual listening now, going you know what, why not?
Anne Boden
Talk about it, do it, don’t do a, you know, a huge amount of research and stay in your bedroom doing the analysis for three years, get out there, talk about it, start something, be brave. You’re not going to launch a business if nobody knows about it.
Elliot Moss
It’s been really nice talking to you, really good, thank you. It’s fabulous to kick off the season with you. Before I let you disappear, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Anne Boden
My song choice is, was inspired really from something in the book that most people ask me about. There’s a story in Banking On It about when I was a child, my parents and myself always got to our feet when the ads came on and had music so, so, an ad come on and whether it’s for cornflakes or for shampoo, we all get up and jog around and sort of and dance and then when the programme started, we, we’d stop and we’d carry on watching the television. Well I, as an eleven year old, I thought that every family did that so, when I visited friends and they didn’t do it, I was quite shocked, you know, sort of what do you do in the adverts? So, so, that prompted me to think about sort of favourite ads and I think I’d like to name, I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing, which was the Coca-Cola ad in, when I was eleven. I think it’s by Roger Greenaway and a Roger Cook and yeah, that’s my music. It’s all about having fun, it’s all about jumping to your feet and dancing away when something inspires you.
Elliot Moss
That was The New Seekers with I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Anne Boden, and she was recollecting how she and her family would dance around the room when they watched their favourite ads, and that was from one of them. She talked about loving a challenge. This is a person who was built for a challenge and you read the book and you will see the other challenges that she faced as the bank that she has created almost didn’t get created. She talked about fun and joy and the importance of that within her work, not just outside of her work. And she talked about the privilege it is to be a CEO and a founder of business and to be responsible for delivering something fantastic and responsible to the people that work for you. All brilliant stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, I’m really pleased to be back for the new season. I hope you have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds of more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to Mishcon.com/JazzShapers.