Colin Frame left school in Biggar at 17 without qualifications. Today the company he founded, Stellar Omada, is a national brand employing 300 people. His motto? ‘You can make your own fortune if you’re prepared to work hard’
Anyone spellbound by the fascinating 2025-26 Scottish Premiership football season will have clocked the name on the shirts of Heart of Midlothian, the challengers pipped in the final minutes of the season by Celtic in Glasgow. The shirt sponsor is Stellar Omada.
Colin Frame, the 39-year-old founder and chief executive of Stella Omada, smiles with quiet confidence as he walks into the thronged Patina coffee house at Edinburgh Park.
His wife and baby have been enjoying time with a baby group, and Frame cuts off his parenting duty to talk about his own success story.
In the post-week haze after the Celtic v Hearts finale there is still controversy around sanctions for a pitch invasion by jubilant Celtic fans as a third goal was scored.
While Frame is sad about Hearts’ failure to secure the league title, he is delighted that his company name is now a national brand.
Frame’s success has not been forged in corporate boardrooms or via business schools, but in the back offices of the Royal Bank of Scotland in the early 2000s, and then in a data centre in Norwich where a 17-year-old from Biggar was sent to help stress test a new banking platform.
Stellar Omada, the Edinburgh-based technology consultancy he founded in 2017, has grown into a company of more than 300 people, with a register of UK clients among notable financial institutions. Turnover in 2024 increased to £14.9m, with profits of £120,000.
From a junior at RBS to challenging Big Four advisory firms
He has been able to displace Big Four advisory firms from major contracts, survived a Covid-era meltdown, built a recruitment arm, Stellar Connect, which doubled its own first year targets, and launched an educational initiative, Stellar Elevate, in 2024 that has now reached a million young people across the country with the backing of NatWest.
Inspired by an occasion in a hot tub in Lochgoilhead, staring up at the stars, the name Stellar Omada comes from the Greek word for a group of stars. And now every person in the company is part of this corporate constellation.
“Every day is different. I try to plan, but there is absolutely no way you can actually interpret the chaos that I have every day in any kind of formal structure.
“Our mission from the very start was to dominate and try and take on large-scale digital change programmes in the regulated space within finance. We have made a really big dent in it over the last seven years. The disappointing thing for me is that we have not done more.”
Born and brought up near Biggar, Frame left school without qualifications. A family friend pointed him towards a junior software tester role with Royal Bank of Scotland.
He started work, aged 17, in January 2004. “I left school with no aspiration to go to college or university. I was in a position where I would become a labourer or a joiner, follow a trade, which is what a lot of people do down in my area.”
Within his first nine months at the bank, he was flying to Norwich four days a week to help build the One Account mortgage platform under the RBS brand. He had no idea what a mortgage was. What he homed in on was the power of stress-testing and that knowledge has proven to be highly durable.
He was placed on RBS’s early talent programme and was always the most junior person in any room. Yet he operated as though that was no barrier.
“I used to do five times more than anybody else. My aim with that was to ensure that people recognised, through whatever means, that I was always going to work harder than everybody else. Work harder was my ethic.”
The RBS years gave him proximity to a scale of banking transformation which few people of his age or background could ever experience. He was part of a senior team that rolled out faster payments, chip and pin, and contactless; technologies that reshaped daily life.
He travelled to Amsterdam in 2009 to help integrate ABN Amro with RBS and was in the Dutch trading centre when the Royal Bank’s share price fell to 10p. He watched colleagues with 30 years of service and lucrative share options lose their pensions overnight in the financial crash.
I left school with no aspiration to go to college or university. I was in a position where I would become a labourer or a joiner, follow a trade, which is what a lot of people do down in my area
How Colin Frame turned early business lessons into business growth
He flew back to Scotland and was told technology services were being outsourced to India, so he resigned, walking into a role with Tesco Personal Finance before the week was out.
Before Stellar Omada there were earlier ventures which generated modest revenue. “We didn’t lose any money. We made a decent amount, but I just didn’t have the feeling that we were going to make it moving forward. But these lessons have been the accelerator for Stellar Omada.”
Working through recruitment intermediaries at margins of around 3 per cent left almost nothing to invest. “Over a 12-month period, if we didn’t take anything, we made about £30,000. Split between two of us it was a lot of work for £15,000.”
The other lesson was about networking. He had been reluctant to lean on the relationships he built in his first decade in banking. This changed with the founding of Stellar Omada, which has become a collective of reciprocity.
How former RBS and banking leaders helped build Stellar Omada
I used to do five times more than anybody else. My aim with that was to ensure that people recognised, through whatever means, that I was always going to work harder than everybody else. Work harder was my ethic
Twelve people, all roughly 20 years older than Colin Frame, sat around the first management table. Some were nearing retirement and had massive professional experience in banking. Every one had been Frame’s boss at some point. They all chose to come back and help him build.
Jim Mullen was Frame’s senior during the ABN Amro integration in Amsterdam. He came back as a contractor between 2018 and 2020. John Moyles, from the Royal Bank years, was another. He recently secured Ann Budge, the former Hearts chair, as a board director.
“The big circle of life always comes around. You shouldn’t be scared to use it. I had this massive weight that helped me push things forward, they had my back, fought my corner and worked 24 hours a day at times to help,” he says of that original group.
The practical support, the connections and the doors that were opened, established Stellar Omada. The circle does not close with Frame. It now extends into the next generation, through the graduates, career changers and young people now passing through Stellar Elevate.
“In ten or 20 years’ time, there will be people coming through and saying that you did this to me and you were part of it. That’s the way the world works.”
One breakthrough was in 2017, when Frame was brought in by a Northampton firm handling payments for Lloyds, HSBC and Barclays. They had been attempting to deliver a central mechanism to move payments between banks and the national payment system. One of the Big Four failed to deliver.
Frame was the last-gasp option. The chairman Royston Hoggarth, who would later become Stellar Omada’s chair, was direct. “You come with a recommendation from the banks. You are the only chance we have now to deliver this. We have both got three weeks to get this done or we will not be here.”
Frame relished this challenge. Within three weeks, the system was live. The delivery was a combination of expertise and improvisation. The technology solution was not ready, so Frame built around it.
“It was string and Sellotape, like the Apollo 13 mission. When things go wrong, you have got to find a solution.” He assembled a team of 30 people flying down from Edinburgh each Monday, living in the office or the pub, sometimes going four days without sleep.
Stellar Omada was the first in the entire industry to transact messages and payments through this new switch. It gave Frame the enterprise-level reference he needed; and Hoggarth has been at his side ever since.
Investing in EdTech initiatives for social mobility
Stellar Omada operated for its first three and a half years without a website, a LinkedIn profile, or a public branding of any kind. It won clients through direct relationship and reputation.
The company turned over £10.2min year three and it started to tell the world about its existence, resulting in the name proudly displayed on football jerseys.
Stellar Elevate began as a commitment to giving people, whether school leavers, graduates, or adults retraining, a genuine opportunity to discover whether a career in technology is for them. It has grown with NatWest backing to reach a million young people across the UK.
Frame has invested £200,000 of his own money and has spoken with First Minister John Swinney about changing the Scottish curriculum.
“That is one of my personal objectives,” says Frame, one of the people the Scottish education system missed. He found his way into technology not through education but through luck, timing, and an instinct to say yes before he fully understood what he was agreeing to.
In 2026, Stellar Omada has approximately 300 people employed and under contract, with its first American clients in New York and four meetings already lined up in Boston around the World Cup.
“You can make your own fortune in life, if you’re prepared to work hard,” he says.