Starling milestones: Winter 2018

Back in May, we mapped out our plan for the rest of the year. As we move towards the end of 2018, we want to celebrate what the team has achieved and share our plans for the New Year.

In the last six months, we’ve launched:

✓ Cash deposits at the Post Office
✓ Sole trader accounts
✓ Joint accounts
✓ Personal accounts for 16 to 18-year-olds
✓ Current Account Switch Service for joint and business accounts
✓ Personal loans
✓ Transaction search
✓ The ability to add notes and receipts to transactions
✓ International payments for US Dollars
✓ High value payments in-app
✓ Nearby payments
✓ Starling for Business Marketplace integrations with Xero (beta) and Zego
✓ Business overdrafts (beta)

and… Round Ups!

The team have been working hard to add new money management tools to the app and are currently testing Round Ups, a feature designed to help you save money. This has been much requested and we are happy to say that it will be released next week. Round Ups will give you the ability to round up transactions to the nearest pound and add these pennies to a Goal of your choice. For example, if you spend £1.45 on a mince pie, 55p could be added to your Goal for Christmas presents. You’ll also be able to multiply your Round Up by 2x, 5x or 10x if you want to increase what you save, each time you spend. This feature will be available to all Starling customers - personal, joint and business.

Just launched

In our latest release (Version 69 for iOS, 58.0 for Android), we made improvements to the way you switch between Starling accounts in the app and updated Spending Insights to help you keep track of your money. You now have the option to change the category for all transactions with a particular merchant. For example, if you’d prefer your local cinema trips to be categorised as ‘Family’ rather than ‘Entertainment,’ you can change this in the app and specify whether you’d like past/future transactions to be categorised in the same way.

From now on, whenever we launch an important new feature, we’ll let you know when you first open the app. The full-screen message will explain what the feature is and how to use it so you don’t miss future updates to the app.

There will be lots of updates to look out for next year. We recently ran a Q&A session on Twitter with our founder and CEO Anne Boden, who ran through some of our plans for next year. We will be doing more of these with Anne and other senior executives in the future.

Euro accounts

We’ve been hard at work on euro accounts for Starling customers who have an ongoing need to make and/or receive payments from Europe. Several members of the team have opened euro accounts and are working on transferring money between accounts and making payments via the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA). Watch this space for more updates.

Down to business

Our mobile business accounts are better than ever. We’ve added the ability to have more than one business account, switch your business account to Starling through the Current Account Switch Service (CASS), deposit and withdraw cash at the Post Office and connect to partners in our business Marketplace. Freelance photographer Lee Garland was among those who helped us test having multiple business accounts and we’ve since engaged other business customers in testing new features and integrations, including the online accounting software Xero.

Our full integration with Xero is currently being tested in beta mode and will soon be available to all Starling business customers. This integration will allow you to share your transaction feed with Xero instantly, taking out form filling and 10 working day delays and making a seamless, efficient link between your bank and your accounting software.

The latest addition to the business Marketplace was Zego, which provides flexible insurance for those working in the gig economy, and there are many more Marketplace partners in the pipeline. We want to connect you to the best-in-class financial products and give you more choice over insurance providers or bill management providers. We have several loan providers coming up in the business Marketplace including Growth Street, as well as invoice insurance provider Nimbla. We’re currently offering overdrafts to a small number of businesses as a test and will be rolling these out to more customers over the coming weeks.

We announced our upcoming integration with Xero at Xerocon earlier this month where Megan Caywood, our Chief Platform Officer, also featured on the 11:FS podcast FinTech Insider (see header photo). November has been a busy month for us - we’ve been out and about meeting our customers at Stylist Live, The Great British Business Show and The Fawcett Society. Stay tuned for more in 2019.