IT is “very, very unlikely” that the big banks will all have branches on the high street in the future, according to the boss of Southampton employer Starling Bank.

Anne Boden, who founded the digital bank that employs 330 people at Town Quay, said banking would continue to move online, with post offices and a “shared branch network” to deliver some services in person.

Asked about the future of high street banking, she said some people needed to go to “some sort of location to get some services”.

She said: “Over time, I think that’s probably going to become the post office or a shared branch network.

“I think in future it’s very, very unlikely that each of the big banks will have a branch on the high street. More and more things are going digital and more people want convenience. You do everything on the app, you want to do your banking on your app, you don’t want to go into a branch and queue.”

She added: “I think there needs to be some way of allowing some services to some people but don’t assume that it’s a certain demographic, older people, that want the branches or can’t use digital. We have customers in their 90s that live their life on their mobile. This is their link to the NHS, this is their link to their family.”

As previously reported, Ms Boden said many talented Hampshire locals were choosing to stay in Southampton and work for Starling rather than move to London.

“Starling doesn’t have a strategy of putting different types of offices in different places. All our offices do everything. So it isn’t as if an office is all about talking to customers, or another office is all about data science,” she said.

“We do everything everywhere in order to tap into the local community and bring in those skills so we have data science everywhere, we have designers everywhere, we have engineers, we have people who talk to customers.”

Speaking to journalists during a visit to Southampton, Ms Boden said the bank had grown rapidly. It was the most switched-to bank over the past four quarters and had a 7.5 per cent share of the banking market for small and medium sized businesses in the UK.

“It’s half the market share of Barclays. We got half the way in four years and they’ve taken hundreds of years,” he said.

She also said the bank had stopped advertising with Facebook’s owner Meta because of scammers using its platforms.

“We believe that it is wrong to take money from fraudsters for ads that they’re placing on their platforms,” she said.

“One of the big threats we have to society is there are so many fraudsters out there scamming customers, encouraging them to give their hard-earned cash away and at the moment we don’t think Facebook, Meta, is doing enough to ensure that fraudsters do not advertise on their platforms.”