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Anne Boden had an impressive track record in the financial services sector: she had thirty years experience at a senior level including Group Chief Operating Officer at Allied Irish Bank. AIB was in the throes of recovering from the 2008 financial crisis when she arrived and she was one of the first to realise that banks needed to do things differently. AIB thought it was at the cutting edge when it proposed opening a branch which allowed customers to access their accounts via a terminal but . Boden took things a step further, realising that customers could access their accounts from their homes: the old branch network, employing thousands of people, would soon become redundant.
Boden also understood that customers had no loyalty to a financial provider and, in her words, nor should they. The focus had to be on the customer and not the operator. She saw clearly that to be profitable a business needed to be scalable whilst still holding costs in check: the emphasis needed to be on technology and innovation. Businesses needed to look at themselves and ask critical questions about the services they were providing. Boden was a visionary: she saw that there was a gap in the market for a digital-only bank, which led to the creation of Starling Bank.