Q&A with FBA’s COO, J Bunker by Angela Cronin – Euromoney

21st December, 2025

In an interview with Euromoney, the Head of Operations for FBA Bank discusses the lessons of 2023.

Q: Now we are nearing the end of 2025, how will you look back on the last 12 to 18 months?

JB: Initially with some satisfaction, given the way the Bank had successfully navigated the impact of two years of pandemic, but then with apprehension when 2025, hailed as the year of recovery, suddenly turned into such a volatile year with further geopolitical and economic shocks that hit the financial markets. Tackling the fallout of higher inflation and interest rates for our customers has inevitably distracted our ability to grow the business as we had originally planned.

Though FBA is amongst the Top Quartile banks in terms of managing risk, there has been a price to pay for this mammoth effort in difficult times for our customers: we’ve simply been unable to take the big steps necessary to transform the bank. End-to-end digital transformation has never been more needed, given the economic outlook, and this has driven home that we need to accelerate our digital-led strategy if retail banks are to find sustainable long-term growth.

That said we haven’t stood still. In 2025 we launched some innovative pilots in areas such as using AI in risk profiling and detecting fraud patterns as well as RPA for back-office processes and ML/Cognitive AI in our call centres: all have shown enormous potential, but now we need to scale these initiatives globally. We have an opportunity to be bold.

Q: What exactly are you trying to do with FBA?

JB: If we are to meet our twin goals of providing exceptional customer experience across all engagement channels and reach up to 20% lower cost-to-serve, then we have to re-imagine and re-design the Bank from front to back. That is not a secret: every Retail bank says much the same. But then you must also factor in our ambition of significant growth in our SME customer base and the consumer product offering and operational changes that need to happen to support this growth.

The challenge is that we have a diverse customer base wanting diverse support. We have to come up with a design and execution that achieves this, which will divert a lot of management and workforce time.

For example, branches account for 75% of distribution costs and nearly 50% of our total costs. Even before the pandemic, footfall into bank branches was falling 10% p.a. across the industry as customers move to on-line services: therefore, branches are closing. But then you get towns where small businesses simply don’t have anywhere to deposit cash takings or have face to face engagement with our SME specialists. So what is the ultimate balance between amazing in-branch customer service for SMEs and Wealth and Millennials customers, but in a cost-effective manner? Same with call-centres – in general they are unpopular and underappreciated because they mainly support transactional services, queries and complaints, but they now need to offer complex advice, and from our perspective become much more “outbound sales” in nature.

But my real concern is the pace and scale of change needed in the infrastructure behind our customer operations. To compete, we have to achieve cost levels unthinkable even five years ago. These solutions are critical to allow FBA to scale if we want to expand geographically or acquire and then integrate banks or simply reduce transaction costs. The accelerated shift to on-line means that even modest-size players in financial services can achieve stretching cost-base levels. So, we have to push further.

Q: Which means? How are you going to do this?

JB: We think there is a huge opportunity to leverage the growing phenomenon of Artificial Intelligence which can impact almost every area of our Bank. Given the digital transformation we are undertaking anyway, we have a unique opportunity to bake AI into our DNA and our future IT and Operating models, so that’s what we are going to do. We were delighted to recently announce our FBA AI Leadership Group so watch this space for further announcements.

Q: Thank you to John for giving us an interesting insight into the challenges facing a retail bank in this increasingly digital world.