Boris Diakonov is co-founder and co-CEO of ANNA Money, the business account and tax admin app for UK small businesses that he runs with his long-time collaborator Eduard Panteleev.
The company says more than 100,000 business owners use it, and on 23 September 2026 it began offering revenue-based funding through YouLend, giving eligible customers access to up to two months’ revenue, usually within 24 hours. That follows £10m in debt funding from Flashpoint VC in December 2025 and the launch of a business savings account in May.
Here he tells Business Matters about scaling Tochka, surviving the Wirecard collapse and why founders should not wait until they feel ready.
What do you currently do at ANNA Money?
I am co-CEO of ANNA Money, a role I share with my co-founder and long-time collaborator Eduard Panteleev. As co-CEOs, Eduard and I share responsibility for overseeing every aspect of the business and its strategic direction.
Eduard and I have been building companies together for 20 years now. ANNA is not where this partnership started, it is where it has led. Earlier in our collaboration we co-founded Tochka, the first digital bank for SMEs in Russia, and scaled it into a unicorn. So by the time we started ANNA we already knew how to work together, which sounds simple, but really is not.
I come from IT and banking infrastructure. I sort of fell into banking through technical roles before ending up running operations, while Eduard’s background is in diplomacy and business. That difference is the whole point. We are not duplicating each other, we are covering different ground.
Day to day, that means Eduard will bring me an idea and I will either back it or push on it until it is stronger. And I will admit I do not always chase every competitor update he sends me, because that is his instinct more than mine.
But on the big calls, what ANNA should actually be and who we are building for, we have always decided those together. Ultimately, we care about the same things: small business owners who get ignored by everyone else, not overcomplicating things, and building something that lasts rather than something that just looks good this quarter.
What was the inspiration behind your business?
ANNA stands for “Absolutely No Nonsense Admin”, and this encapsulates the challenge we help solve for our customers. Despite their critical importance to the economy, small businesses are regularly overlooked.
Around 90 per cent of businesses in the UK have fewer than 10 employees, but combined they generate roughly half of GDP and provide around a third of jobs. If SMEs are empowered to thrive, the economy thrives, but they are all too often held back by cumbersome regulation and products that were not designed with small businesses in mind. We endeavour to remove as much of this burden as possible.
The genesis of the business goes back decades and represents the culmination of Eduard’s and my previous ventures as entrepreneurs. I began my career in Russia in the 1990s as a self-taught developer in the early days of the internet. It was an exciting time that led me to work on one of the world’s first internet banking solutions. That is how I met Eduard, who worked in a similar space.
Our shared experience made us natural collaborators. Together we co-founded Tochka, a digital bank for small businesses and entrepreneurs in Russia. Given that SMEs were often underserved by mainstream banks, there was clear demand. This meant Tochka became a quick success; at its peak around one in every five Russian businesses were customers.
Around a decade ago, we made the decision to come to the UK to start ANNA. This was based on the simple idea that the needs of small businesses and entrepreneurs are alike wherever in the world they are, and we could take everything we had learnt about building solutions for underserved SMEs to the UK too.
Who do you admire?
Personally, I admire anyone whose aim in life is to be helpful. You are never too important to load the office dishwasher.
It is difficult to name just one person. I admire anyone who commits themselves to making an idea real, whether or not it succeeds. You can be inspired by someone’s character, quality or effort, without treating success as proof that everything about them is admirable.
Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?
Er, not used Wirecard. That has really been our biggest disaster, looking back. When Wirecard collapsed our customers could not access their money, so they were understandably very upset. We set up a live Q&A on YouTube so we could answer customers’ questions directly and tell them that we were working on a solution.
We quickly made a deal with Railsbank to move our entire backend over to them, and rather than just patch things up we used it as a chance to properly rebuild. We let people keep using their old accounts while the new ones got set up, so nobody was stuck mid-switch while we sorted everything out.
It took a few months to get everything fully migrated, but customers actually ended up better off: faster payments, their business name showing up on transfers, things we would not have prioritised if Wirecard had not forced our hand. It was a horrible few weeks at the time, but in hindsight it is a good example of turning someone else’s mess into something that made the product better.
What defines your way of doing business?
Conviction needs to be there, but conviction gets reinforced when you actually start playing with an idea in the wild. You can have the idea, but the only way to really test it is to get it in front of customers and see what happens.
We were stuck for a while in what you would call analysis paralysis, and then there was this moment of thinking: what is actually stopping us from starting? So we did. ANNA started as a straightforward business account and payments service, and from there we just listened. We watched what our customers valued and what problems kept coming up.
Tax and accounting kept eating people’s time and money, and with where the technology is now, that is a totally unnecessary cost, so automating it became the obvious next priority. It is not a one-off thing. ANNA as a concept is still evolving; it is more of a journey.
I gain confidence when I see clients actually happy to pay for what we deliver. That is the real signal. We want to build something that takes away every admin task standing between entrepreneurs and what they are actually trying to do, but you cannot build that overnight. You just have to keep listening, stay disciplined about what you prioritise, and not lose sight of where you are headed.
What advice would you give to someone starting out?
You will never feel truly ready to accomplish difficult things, so do not wait. Sometimes you must begin before you feel completely ready.
It is also essential that the problem you aim to solve with your business idea is something you truly care about, as that passion will drive you when times get tough. Once you have identified that, you need to immerse yourself in the problem, speaking to the people experiencing it and to experts in the field, and let that shape your journey.
Of course, there is no doubt that you will face setbacks and make changes along the way, but that core driver will help you build something that matters and has impact.
My last piece of advice is to choose people you can trust to work through the difficult moments with. I am lucky that I found Eduard so early in my career and we have been able to bounce off each other, but the same rule applies to the wider team you build around you.
