Battle of the Challengers
New Year’s Day, 2014, Anne Boden was on a cruise, skirting the coast of South Africa. She’d just left her job as chief operating officer of Allied Irish Banks and harboured a burning desire to create her own bank in the UK. “It’s going to be a new sort of bank,” she told a fellow passenger. “With a different approach. A digital bank.”
Boden’s idea was to start a new bank featuring a current account at its core. Other neo-banks had been launched over the years to market savings products or credit cards; none had been built around the simple current account. It was a hard market to crack: big established players managed 85% of the nation’s bank accounts, a position they’d clung to for years. On average, people held a current account for 16 years, famously longer than the average duration of a marriage which in the UK is 12 years. And, relatedly, the market wasn’t especially profitable. “You’ll never make any money out of a current account,” bankers warned Boden. “It’s a loss leader.”
Bod…