The 5ft tall, Welsh woman who decided to start a new bank… persuaded people to

The diminutive Welsh woman who founded the UK’s first digital-only bank is the queen of understatement.

Looking as far removed from the typical banking stereotype as possible, Swansea-born Anne Boden chortled as she says: “There I was, a 5ft tall Welsh woman, still with my Welsh accent, knocking at the doors of big city law firms saying I’m going to start a bank.

“I said you’ve just got to give me a couple of hundred million and I’ll make you lots of money.”

If trying to start a bank sounds like an “audacious plan”, that’s because it is admits Anne. Yet it took her a tough two years to pull the money together and now, aged 61, she can sit back and say she’s done it and is the chief executive of Starling Bank.

After launching in 2017, two million people have opened an account with Starling and it has more than £6 billion in deposits. The bank is today the fastest-growing bank for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Europe and it’s on track to report its first year of profit by the end of the next financial year.

It’s been a “rollercoaster of a ride” to get here, admits Anne, another devastating understatement as she recounts how she almost lost her fledgling business on separate occasions thanks to a clash of personalities and a public row with the man who would eventually go on to found the London-based online bank, Monzo.

The roots of her one-woman quest to rebuild Britain’s banking system, starting from the ground up, can be traced all the way back to the four-year-old girl growing up in Bonymaen in Swansea in 1964. An only child, she lived with supportive and devoted parents: Nancy, who worked in the local department store, and Jack, who worked for British Steel.

“I’d always loved science and technology,” explained Anne excitedly, her infectious grin matched by a sparkle in her eyes.

“My fourth birthday present was a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Which is a very strange present but I loved it, playing around with that sort of thing.”

She chortles again – something she will do often during our chat: “And I’ve still got it.”

Anne went to Cefn Hengoed school – “where very few people go on to university” – before studying computer science and chemistry at Swansea University.

“Computer science at that stage wasn’t very popular but I loved it,” she said. “It was very easy for me but chemistry was a bit different – it was all about experiments and Bunsen burners and chemicals and I hated it.” She still hates cooking for the same reasons, she laughed. Her two loves in life are technology and shoes – she couldn’t live without either she admits.

After graduating, the young Anne had no desire to head for London but it was her mother who pushed her to find a “safe normal job”. Despite the odds being stacked against her, Anne won a place on the coveted Lloyds Bank graduate scheme. Arriving in the big smoke in 1981 signalled the beginning of a career in banking that would take Anne all over the world and eventually to the top of the tree.

“It was brilliant – all of a sudden I realised I was much better at work than I was a academics,” said Anne brightly, who could hardly believe her luck. “It was interesting things with interesting people and I got to play with computers and they would even pay me for it.”

While the graduate scheme allowed Anne to try her hand at every facet of the business, she was quick to realise that “all the exciting work was being done in the front office while I was working in the back office with the computers”. So Anne embarked on an MBA, which she studied in the evenings because she couldn’t afford to study in London full time.

After a stint at Price Waterhouse, Anne took a job with the Swiss bank, UBS. It took another nudge from her parents – her dad this time- to set her in a direction she hadn’t quite anticipated.

“My dad phoned me up and…