Digital lender Starling Bank considers opening office in Leeds or Manchester

Starling Bank recently revealed that it aims to overtake its mainstream rival Barclays in the business banking market within five years as it also gears up for a stock market float.

Around 78% of Starling's customers are based outside London. In Yorkshire and The Humber , Starling has 168,622 individual accounts and 30,344 business accounts.

Starling’s founder and chief executive, Anne Boden told The Yorkshire Post: "We like to hire people into an office they can call home; most of the hiring over the last year has been in Cardiff, where we have 800 staff."

Ms Boden said there is a fifty-fifty chance Starling will have an office in Leeds or Manchester over the next two years.

Ms Boden said she was really worried about the squeeze on consumers, although she said Starling was doing well.

"We think lots of places outside London can combine a great life with work,'' she said. "Inflation is going to have a much bigger impact on people on lower incomes than people on higher incomes.

"The UK is seen as the centre of the fintech world. It started in Shoreditch and lots of places in the UK now have fintech hubs. All of our offices do everything, so we have data science and engineers in every office."

Ms Boden also said it was often harder for women to establish themselves in financial services, adding: "Women have great ideas and a huge amount of ability to get things done, but unfortunately they are told to go away more often than men.

"We mustn't assume that the older demographic have not embraced digital ways of banking, We have customers in their 90s who live their life on their mobiles."

Starling Bank has revealed that it aims to overtake its mainstream rival Barclays in the business banking market within five years.

Last year Ms Boden, told the PA news agency it was a “very realistic” timescale to surpass the Big Five player and more than double its 7% share of the small business market.

In an updated paperback edition of her book, Banking On It, Ms Boden said she no longer considered the likes of Monzo – set up by Starling co-founder Tom Blomfield, who left to launch the rival online bank – as her direct competition.

“The extraordinary experiences of the year 2020 made it clearer than ever that our competitors are now Lloyds, Barclays et al,” she wrote.

Barclays, which she said has around a 15% share of the market, is “now in our sights”, she added in the new chapter.

The group’s meteoric rise in the small business market has reportedly attracted the attentions of various suitors, such as Lloyds Banking Group and JPMorgan Chase.

Last year, Ms Boden said Starling Bank was hiring staff to work remotely in Yorkshire at a time when digital services have become as important as access to heat and light.

After a 30-year career in senior leadership roles at global banks, including Allied Irish Banks, Royal Bank of Scotland and ABN AMRO, Ms Boden founded mobile bank Starling in 2014.

She raised $70 million and obtained a UK banking licence in 2016, launching Starling’s first account in 2017.

In an update last year, the group said it now has more than 2.3 million customer accounts, of which over 370,000 are small businesses, having more than doubled its SME customer base in the past year, giving it a 6.3% share of the UK small firms banking market.