Paul Pester, the former TSB chief executive who fell on his sword in the wake of a disastrous IT failure at the UK lender, is set to launch a social networking app enabling friends and family members to share money.
Sky News has learnt that Pester has teamed up with Anthony Thomson, the Metro Bank and Atom Bank founder, and former CompareTheMarket chief Matthew Donaldson to set up Loop, which began a period of beta-testing last week.
City sources said that Loop had raised a round of seed funding from a group of wealthy investors, and was now preparing for a larger Series A fundraising to take place in early 2022.
Initially aimed at students and young professionals, consumers who register on the app will be able to create a social network which enables them to easily share money with each other.
Pester quit TSB in 2018 after customers faced months of poor quality service and online downtime at the bank following a bungled upgrade to a new computer system from Spansish parent Banco Sabadell.
Pester came to be seen as the public face of the fiasco, hounded by politicians in Parliamentary hearings and criticised by the FCA for not being entirely transparent about the scale of the problems facing the bank.
Since his departure, Pester has become chair of the campaign group Fairer Finance's advisory board, and has advised private equity groups including KKR and Pollen Street Capital on investments in the financial services sector.
In other news, Debbie Crosbie, who took over from Pester as CEO of TSB, has found a new perch, becoming the first female chief executive at Nationwide Building Society.