In Boden’s new book Banking On It, Starling Bank CEO revealed her version of events that took place back in 2015, which lead to the rise of Tom Blomfield’s Monzo bank.
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An extract from her book was released last week in The Sunday Times and Boden describes how Blomfield, who was the CTO at Bank Possible (previous version of Starling), launched a coup in February 2015.
“Tom Blomfield, Gary Dolman (who would later become Monzo’s CFO), and Jason Bates (who would later co-found 11:FS) met with Eileen Burbidge and Stefan Glaenzer at Passion Capital and agreed on a deal. Tom made it clear that he was not able to work with me.”
“It was all such a shock. Somehow Tom had taken my place—Passion Capital was in and I was out.”
According to Boden, Blomfield and others pushed for her to take responsibility for all of Starling’s debts, which at the time included more than £1m owed to KPMG and PwC.
Boden has declined this, so Blomfield and the rest departed to start Monzo. However, this left Starling Bank “staff-less, un-investable, and heavily indebted”.
“This was Starling’s near-death experience. At the time, I had no way of knowing if it was one stage further than that. Whichever way I looked at it, I was effectively back at square one,” writes Boden.
Boden’s second book will be published on 5th November by Penguin Business.
