Who you're meeting
Anne Boden MBE, Welsh tech entrepreneur, founder and former CEO of Starling Bank, and the first woman to found a British bank[2]. Now CEO of AI by Boden[1].
Background: a roughly 30-year career in financial services (Lloyds, Standard Chartered, UBS, CIO at Aon) before launching Starling[2][7]. Awarded an MBE for services to fintech in 2018[2]. She is an active public speaker, billed for London Tech Week 2026[6] and headline speaker at the inaugural Wales Fintech Festival[14].
- Strong rapport ground: her mission to get more women founding and using technology. Lead there.
- Light to avoid: framing AI as new to her, or treating her purely as "the Starling person" when she has clearly moved on.
Their company
AI by Boden Ltd is her current vehicle, registered in the UK and classified under management consultancy activities; she keeps its specific model private[4]. This is where her energy is now[3].
Starling Bank, the UK digital bank she founded, posted a fifth straight year of profitability, with pre-tax profit of £217.1m for the year to March 2026 and deposits up to £12.7bn[12]. Anne has reduced her stake to roughly 2.7%, down from 4.3%, in a secondary sale[5].
Key people
If the meeting is about Anne's own work, the Starling names matter less than her taskforce and AI-by-Boden orbit. If it's about Starling, Bhatia's team is who actually buys.
What's recent and material
- 11 Jun 2026 — Starling priced its first public bond (£150m Tier 2), oversubscribed 2.5x[13].
- IPO question live but unsettled — the CEO is non-committal on timing and venue, and a top shareholder reportedly cooled on a London listing, raising talk of New York[12].
- Oct 2024 — a £29m FCA fine for sanctions-screening failures still shadows the bank[12].
- Ongoing — Anne's taskforce is pushing hard on women and AI skills, noting "year on year more women are founding AI-based enterprises"[15].
Anne is in active build-and-advocate mode on AI for women founders, the exact space this training works in.
Your angle into this meeting
The skill's read of the facts above — interpretation, not new facts.
- The pitch probably isn't "teach Anne AI". The stronger fit is your practical, women-focused AI training plugged into her mission, her taskforce goal of giving women "the tools to take their businesses to the next level", including technology adoption[15]. Bet: she values partners who make AI genuinely usable for women, not just talked about.
- Your "built the tools I teach" credibility maps onto Anne's own builder-not-theorist identity. Bet: shared respect for shipping real things over demos opens the door.
- A possible route in: training for the founders and teams in Anne's networks (taskforce, the Female Founders' Playbook community), not Anne herself. Bet: she's a connector and amplifier more than a single buyer.
Questions to ask
- Where does the taskforce see the biggest skills gap holding women founders back on AI right now?
- For AI by Boden, what does "industry disruption" look like in practice this year?
- Who in your world most needs hands-on AI skills, the founders, their teams, or the wider community?
- What's worked, and what's fallen flat, in the AI upskilling you've seen so far?
Objections to anticipate
- "I already live in AI, why would I need training?" — Agree; position yourself as the person who makes AI stick for others, not for Anne.
- "Isn't this just another workshop people forget?" — Lead with your "people leave able to do the thing" track record.
- "I'm not at Starling day-to-day anymore." — Good; the conversation is about her women-and-AI mission, not Starling procurement.
Opener and next step
"I loved that the taskforce is pushing women toward AI-based enterprises, that's exactly the gap I work on: turning 'AI matters' into people actually using it confidently the next day."
A short, no-obligation session design for one of her communities (a taskforce cohort or the Female Founders' network), so she can see the "they leave able to do it" effect first-hand.