Starling Bank chief executive Ann Boden has expressed her opinion on the future of bank branches.
She said: “Over time, I think that’s probably going to become the post office or a shared branch network.
Read also: Revolut has offered relocation support to all its Ukraine-based employees
“I think in future it’s very, very unlikely that each of the big banks will have a branch on the high street. More and more things are going digital and more people want convenience. You do everything on the app, you want to do your banking on your app, you don’t want to go into a branch and queue.”
The bank, the first of the challengers to make a profit last year, has seen huge growth in both its personal and retail customers across the UK.
With about £8bn in deposits, the company is getting prepared for an IPO within the next two years and plans to debut its services in Europe in 2022.
Anne added: “I think there needs to be some way of allowing some services to some people but don’t assume that it’s a certain demographic, older people, that want the branches or can’t use digital. We have customers in their 90s that live their life on their mobile. This is their link to the NHS, this is their link to their family.”
“Starling doesn’t have a strategy of putting different types of offices in different places. All our offices do everything. So it isn’t as if an office is all about talking to customers, or another office is all about data science,” she said.
Starling was the most switched-to bank over the past four quarters and had a 7.5 percent share of the banking market for small and medium-sized businesses in the UK.
“It’s half the market share of Barclays. We got half the way in four years and they’ve taken hundreds of years,” he said.
She also said the bank had stopped advertising with Facebook’s owner Meta because of scammers using its platforms.
“We believe that it is wrong to take money from fraudsters for ads that they’re placing on their platforms,” she said.
