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This article should really put into perspective what a fab milestone Anne and Starling have acheived. Being a digital only challenger bank that makes a profit! I think it shows if anything that the Starling valuation is under where it really should be.

Unfortunately this is a problem that has been solved for quite sometime, and there is already the worlds largest identity network that helps provide it. The issue is not "tech", rather it is a cultural mind-shift to embrace digital identity. I cannot see the population masses trusting incumbent providers like Mastercard in this space, even though they are followed a decentralised approach and place data in the hands of the identity holder. 

As for a health pass - I have seen some unbelievable implemenetations that far exceed any user experiences I have seen from anyone to date in this field, they simply need to get to production and then get the right support.

A lot to cover, and I hope they are up to speed in what is happening at the leading edge of many of these areas. I am often concerned that "leading" in Financial Services is actually often more following 3-5 years behind other sectors. Take API adoption, the industry is miles behind and now, direct APIs arent the models that many tech focussed companies follow, rather they opt for true asyncronous event pattern processes.

Instant payments is a great success, its the expectation of all customers and will continue to drive change across the sector. Financial services often sees digitalisation "unlimited" as moving away from manual processes and putting these processes simply in a digital forma, the process and thinking though remains very analogue and dated - so I would love to see real innovative leadership of thought here....

As for Open Banking, this needs to move to open finance and ditch direct APIs if it is to be practicle let alone a real success story. Intraday liquidity needs addressing but conscious that the correspondent banking model as it is (and evolving) still doesnt really aid in this since the model is dated. its not helped with the fact that ISO 20022 has so many different flavours and always will have - so I am not sure on the home stretch there to be honest....

Finally, payments and BaaS. I really hope they "get really" what BaaS is, its potential and how many banks should be looking to BaaS providers to help drive down their operational costs and operational risk, while helping them gain greater control and greater flexibility in the products they can bring to market. And as for CBDC, we need a good strong debate on looking at the negatives and challenges, all too often focus is on a "happy path" and specific use cases without addressing the issues and challenges. At the moment, CBDC has many more unknown implications and raised issues that problems it can solve.....

This is a step in the right direction, however, its digital representation yet again of analogue processing and thought. In many ways, this is a mini-disk moment...

You simply have to tip your hat to Anne and the Starling journey. She has followed her vision quite closely, flirted with other areas that havent gone so well for the bank, but the recent focus on retail customers and SMEs has shown the right strategic approach - and it is clearly working.

Being a profitable bank month on month is not just unique to the new challenger bank world, just look at figures posted by incumbent banks and you can see that at £1.1b, Starling maybe undervalued when compared with mass losses of others.

I think the challenges you call out are not due to a change of working environments, but a poor operational process and lack of desire to move with the times. Its about the culture those businesses harvested. 

We do often hear of the negatives of working from home, however, my own experience of large teams working from home for many years now has been quite the opposite. I find that work life balance is often much improved, helping mental health and easing stress loads. This promotes better efficiency and sees team members becoming far more productive - even innovative. Yes - even with collaboration tools we sometimes lack that ability to collaborate quite as effectively, but again this is often down to the lack of experience of using the right collaborative tools. Simply installing Whiteboard from within the Microsoft store on your PC has dramatic improvements on collaboration and visualisation. 

Not commuiting is a blessing for the vast majority of people, and yes, no travel expenses is a great thing for finance departments. (How they struggle to keep tabs on working capital when spend is less like this is a bit beyond me) and yes we sometimes miss the social side of working together in the office, and this is why i dont believe working from home will be 100% of the time for the vast majority of us, rather the vast majority of us will work say 70% of the time from home. The challenges are pretty clear for finance teams.

The cold reality is, that those businesses that failed to allow people to work from home prior to COVID-19 had simply not made the right investments in terms of technology but also in terms of understanding working from home from a culture persepctive within the business. If they had, they would have been able to easily cope with the shift of the entire workforce working from home. As I said at the start of this comment, this is a side effect of a culture failing within the business.... 

Its interesting the case made by central banks and regulators for cyber security and resilience for commercial banks. Many have "buffers" added to their capital requirements because of perceived operational risk. How does this work for central banks? 

I am also a little shocked that we have functions like "email" still being on-premisis, dependent on an ICT provider (or internal IT personell) to secure, patch and mantain that system. Surely the EBA must be thinking of moving to Office 365 and utilising the capabiltieis of that Azure cloud based service to take advantage of the cyber security capabilities of the cloud and not on-prem..... ????

What is employee data and customer data doing on a file sharing system? It seems to me there isnt a single day that goes by where the need for SSI (Self-Sovereign Identitiy) isnt illustrated by such security challenges.

Its time that we as financial services understood what data we really need to hold, and what data should be presented to us. Only then will we understand that data is a liability - not an asset 

The successor of the OBIE needs to look into the viability of having a world of direct APIs, if it does it will see that the current approach isnt one that can remain scalabale as we move to more open finance. This is something i have written about, we need to move away from direct APIs if we want Open Finance to succeed.

Kill APIs if we want Open Finance – FinTechAndrew – The blog (wordpress.com)

I think this is a drop in the ocean compared to what is spent by the large tech companies such as Microsoft and Google on this....I dont see why this is needed/seen as a good idea