Anthony Thomson

Why organisations work with Anthony Thomson

• He is one of the very few operators in the world who has launched three licensed banks on three different models: a physical high-street challenger, a UK app-only bank, and an Australian smart bank.
• His Metro Bank launch ended a century-long drought of new UK high-street banks and set the reference point for what a customer-centred retail banking proposition looks like.
• He speaks from the chair’s seat, not the analyst’s gallery. Every argument he makes about challenger strategy, brand, and regulation has been tested against a real balance sheet and a real regulator.
• With Lucian Camp he wrote No Small Change (Wiley), a direct manifesto on why financial services marketing is broken and what has to replace it.
• He can brief a boardroom on what it actually takes to turn a strategy deck about “customer obsession” into a licensed, funded, operating business.

Biography highlights

• Co-founder and founding chairman, Metro Bank, the first new UK high-street bank for over a century.
• Founder and former chairman, Atom Bank, the UK’s first app-only bank, licensed in 2015.
• Co-founder and former chairman, 86 400, Australia’s first smart bank, later acquired by NAB.
• Chair of Zip UK, the UK arm of the Australian buy-now-pay-later group.
• Co-author, No Small Change: Why Financial Services Needs A New Kind of Marketing, Wiley, 2018, with Lucian Camp.
• Co-founder and former chairman, The Financial Services Forum; Visiting Professor at London Metropolitan University and David Goldman Visiting Professor at Newcastle University Business School.

Biography

Metro Bank opened its first branch in Holborn in July 2010, the first new high-street bank to enter the UK market in more than a hundred years. Anthony Thomson co-founded the bank and served as its founding chairman, steering it from concept to licensed, trading retail institution.

He did not stop there. A few years after leaving Metro, Thomson founded Atom Bank, the UK’s first app-only bank, which secured its banking licence in 2015. He then co-founded 86 400, Australia’s first smart bank, which was later acquired by National Australia Bank. Three licensed banks, three distinct models, one consistent thesis: the industry is overdue a redesign around the customer.

That thesis is argued at length in No Small Change (Wiley, 2018), co-written with Lucian Camp, which treats financial services marketing as a discipline in need of serious reconstruction rather than a cosmetic refresh. Earlier in his career, Thomson co-founded City Financial Marketing, later acquired by Publicis, and The Financial Services Forum, giving him a practitioner’s view of brand and proposition design across the sector before he ever chaired a bank.

Today he chairs Zip UK and speaks to boards, executive teams, and regulators about what it actually takes to launch and scale a new financial business. His work holds a precise answer to a question many incumbents struggle with: where does customer-led transformation stop being a slogan and start being a balance sheet.

Key speaking topics

• Challenger banking and fintech strategy
• Customer-led retail banking models
• Launching regulated businesses from scratch
• Brand and marketing in financial services
• Digital and mobile-first banking
• Entrepreneurship inside regulated industries

Ideal for

• Boards and executive teams of banks, insurers, and asset managers reviewing customer strategy.
• CMOs and brand leaders in financial services rethinking proposition and marketing investment.
• Founders, investors, and transformation leads building or funding fintech and regulated ventures.

Audience outcomes

• A clearer view of what separates a challenger proposition that scales from one that stalls at launch.
• A concrete account of how a licensed bank gets designed, funded, and brought to market.
• Sharper questions to take back to their own customer, brand, and distribution strategy.
• A realistic sense of where regulation helps and where it quietly kills good ideas.