Team size (optional): 36 people

What are the key projects you have been involved in over the past twelve months?

I was appointed Group General Counsel of Starling Bank in June 2025. Within my first six months, I redesigned the group legal operating model and led a series of strategically defining transactions, while embedding myself into a profitable, fully-licensed bank servicing over 4.5 million accounts.

Starling occupies a distinct “mature challenger” position, balancing technical agility with the heavy regulatory responsibilities of a primary account provider. A central part of my role has been managing the “scaling friction” inherent in governing a dual-revenue model that spans high-volume retail banking and the global licensing of our Engine SaaS platform.

Key projects included Engine’s expansion into North America. I led my group legal team, working alongside the Engine legal team, to advise on Engine’s landmark cross-border transaction with Tangerine Bank, a subsidiary of Scotiabank — Engine’s first North American client and its largest deal to date. The ten-year agreement will see Tangerine upgrade its core digital banking system to Engine’s cloud-native platform, enabling the business to serve more than two million clients in Canada. This built on earlier launches with Salt Bank in Romania (which reached 500,000 customers within a year), AMP Bank GO in Australia, and a subsequent transaction with SBS Bank in New Zealand, positioning Engine as a transformational pillar of the group’s strategy to become a global financial services group.

The acquisition of Ember was another key project. I advised the group on its August 2025 acquisition of Ember, a digital tax and accounting platform for small business owners — Starling’s second M&A transaction after the acquisition of Fleet Mortgages in 2021. This strategically significant deal supports the group’s 9% small business banking market share, integrating Ember’s HMRC-recognised software into the Starling app and making it exclusive to Starling customers.

I led the legal team delivering Starling Group’s debut bond issuance on the London Stock Exchange, securing record pricing for a Tier 2 offering of below £200m, which was 2.5x oversubscribed.

I delivered a critical Group corporate reorganisation completed in June 2025, inserting a new UK holding company and an intermediate holding company above the UK bank, Engine and other subsidiaries. This prepares the bank for a future transition to the Bank of England’s bail-in resolution strategy, positions the group for a potential future IPO, and enables group-level governance.

Please provide a brief description of any internal transformation/development projects within your legal team over the last twelve months.

On joining, I designed and implemented a new legal function framework built around three pillars: group-wide teams; a bank-specific team; and dedicated teams for the Engine and Fleet Mortgages businesses.

I embedded six group-wide centres of excellence and teams — Group Corporate, Group Employment, Group Commercial, Data Privacy, and Regulatory Affairs — and restructured the banking legal team.

The result is a structure that bridges the gap between a lean fintech culture and the rigorous standards of a systemic financial institution, ensuring our governance and compliance control frameworks evolve at a rate matching the growth of our 4.5 million-strong customer base.

Alongside this restructuring, I created and finalised Starling Group’s inaugural panel of external law firms in January 2026, a foundational initiative ensuring the group’s ongoing growth strategy is supported by the best possible external advice at competitive cost.

Since the restructuring, it has been very important to me to keep the team motivated and to continue embedding our strategy of being a high-performing, strategic and commercial Legal, Data Privacy & Regulatory Affairs team. A key part of this was championing the use of AI to ease the team’s workload. Working with our AI champions, we implemented Wordsmith, an AI platform for legal professionals that drafts, reviews, redlines and compares documents, runs legal research across primary sources and connected systems, and automates recurring work through agents, playbooks, reports and reusable templates. It has been live across the business since June, and we are already seeing tangible improvements and excellent feedback from the team.

The role of the GC has evolved significantly into that of a strategic business partner. How do you balance commercial objectives with legal risk?

Sound legal judgement is also commercial judgement. My role is to help the business move quickly and confidently, not to sit outside it as a brake. That matters especially at Starling, where we run a dual-revenue model: a retail bank serving over 4.5 million accounts, and Engine, our cloud-native SaaS platform licensed to banks worldwide. Each carries a very different risk profile, and the art lies in governing both proportionately. The retail bank demands the rigorous controls of a systemic account provider; Engine must move at the pace of a global technology business. My job is to manage that “scaling friction” embedding legal early in commercial decisions and building governance that flexes with each business. Balancing ambition with risk isn’t about saying no; it’s about finding the route to yes.

What are the most important attributes of the modern GC and what advice would you give to those aspiring to be an in-house lawyer?

The modern GC has to be three things at once: a first-rate lawyer, a commercial leader, and a trusted advisor. Technical excellence is the price of entry, but what sets a GC apart is judgement, knowing which risks matter, and having the courage to give clear advice under pressure. My own path shaped that view: from Weil, Gotshal & Manges in London and New York, through GE Capital, Aviva and Lombard International, to Starling. Qualifying in both the UK and US, and working across highly regulated, international businesses, taught me to be adaptable and commercially fluent.

My advice to aspiring in-house lawyers: master the law, but invest just as much in understanding the business. Be curious, build relationships across every function, and never underestimate the value of sound judgement, integrity and the confidence to say what needs to be said.

Beyond your legal role, is there a cause or initiative you are especially passionate about?

Beyond my executive role, I am actively engaged in mentoring and supporting the next generation of legal professionals, and I am passionate about diversity, equity and inclusion within the legal industry. I contribute to a number of charitable and governance initiatives, including serving on boards and advisory committees for organisations such as The Royal British Legion and The Elton John AIDS Foundation.