This week’s Sunday Times Business interview is with Anne Boden, a few interesting nuggets but it’s repeating most of the ‘greatest hits’. Most interesting is the fact the reporter again thinks £1,450 is the average personal customer balance, would be good if someone would one day challenge the bank on this figure (as their main letter said this average is what is ‘reached’ by the ‘typical’ customer).
I mentioned before that this figure might be talking about the average ‘peak’ balance by adding the word reach, rather than the average overall balance across the year. And even then, excluding some personal account customers as ‘not typical’.
This seems to make sense, as the same letter says the average balance for limited companies is £10k, and £1.6k for SMEs, with a 60:40 split of business accounts between these two sets of customers. This means the real average balance of business customers is £6.6k rather than £10.5k mentioned using the same methodology as the £1450 for personal customers.
The ‘typical’ personal account customer is someone who isn’t depositing their salary in to their accounts - have Starling really excluded these people from their analysis? It’s all very opaque.