Chances are if you’re downloading a banking app, you’re well aware of the advantages: convenience, security and control at your fingertips.
But not all accounts are made equal; at Starling, our customer’s security is at the top of our list — an ever-evolving process that gets more sophisticated with many layers of security working together. So, without giving it all away (for obvious reasons), here are some of the things we’re doing to keep you and your money safe.
Setting things up
When you sign up, one of the first things we’ll ask you is to set up a password made up of six or more alphanumeric characters — take mental note because this is always needed when you want to make payments, add payees, change details on your account or if you need to recover your account if you lose your phone.
Legally, we’re obliged to make sure that we check you are who you say you are. That’s why when you setup your account we’ll ask you to record and submit a short live video of yourself — we’ll let you know what to say, (nothing too embarrassing) — this is for security purposes only and we’ll never use it for marketing. We’ll also need to verify the information on your account by getting you to send us a photo of your UK driving licence or passport. This is manually checked against your account by one of our customer support team members and if it’s all good, it’ll only take a short time to get approved. Later down the track, if we ever need to verify you again — say you’ve forgotten your password — we can get you to re-record a message and compare it to your original video. Simple, but effective.
Once you’re all set up, if you’ve enabled Touch ID or Fingerprint scan to access your phone, your phone’s operating system will have already securely verified you against the data stored on your device. This means we don’t need to ask you for a passcode every time you want to check your balance. But if you want an extra level of privacy, you can enable these features every time you launch the app.
Smarter spending
Ever had a charge on your card in Krakow when you’re at home in Kent? Here’s a hot tip: real-time notifications are not only handy to see exactly how much money you’ve got in your account, but can actually be useful to detect if someone’s trying to access your account fraudulently. This, along with our own tech that monitors card transaction activity, significantly reduces the risk of fraud.