It’s very much the type of job title a child would make up when pretending to be an adult, sounds familiar!
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Thanks, interesting. Things that struck me:
- 300+ employees seems like a lot to me, but I have no idea how many customers they have
- I’m not sure why they think the can either grow or innovate. Seems like if they want to succeed, they need to learn to do both! (Unless they mean they’ve grown their headcount too quickly? See previous point.)
- I wonder how much independence they have from BBVA when making these decisions. Not saying they don’t, but would be interesting to know.
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and I wonder when BBVA will be taking the axe to Atom Bank ?
Is Atom being absorbed/wound down?
@Pipefish intesting. Is it not important to remember in this conversation about who has built infrastructure from scratch and who has bought existing technology. I was under the impression that Starling had bought existing back end and monzo had built most from scratch.
I must say I went for an interview at Starling in december and in my department they had no clue what Monzo were doing. They thought that Monzo was just going to offer a pre paid card.
Guess it’s what we call HR over this side of the pond 
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Yeah, CPO is Head of HR under the American system of directorships/titles which are increasingly popular in the UK
I don’t know for sure, but I was under the opposite impression. Whilst Starling have not built their own MasterCard processor like Monzo have, I believe they’ve built their core systems themselves. But maybe this is something I assumed a long time ago and now believe to be true.
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And I think HR was the previous American import? Prior to that wasn’t there a head of personnel? (My working life started after the HR invasion, so not sure on that one.)
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yes my dad was group personnel officer at the Co-op a while back before it became human resources and now ‘people officers’ (apparently)
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Oh I see, Wasn’t that the whole reason that Tom left?
No specific reasons have ever been given as far as I’m aware. From what I’ve read, I took it to be more about development style (e.g. alpha/beta pre-paid cards, testing features out with users, big community involvement, etc) and being able to follow his vision. If you’ve ever heard or read any of the interviews with Tom, he has a very clear view of what Monzo can be and how he sees “banking” changing for the mobile/connected world. Being a bank for Monzo is clearly just a step towards being a new kind of financial core for people’s lives.
Even if Starling’s initial plans are similar to Monzo’s, or even if the general philosophy is similar, I can imagine that for someone with a vision of how they want to do this, even making small compromises around the edges would be unsatisfactory. And over time, these add up and push you on a different trajectory than you set off on.
As I say, though, I don’t know the specifics of Starling’s development, so maybe they have bought a number of standard software components off-the-shelf. But I didn’t think that was the defining difference between the two.
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They haven’t diversified their portfolio at all. Maybe a word of warning for challenger banks launching CA first and just sticking with it?
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As I recall Starling and 
Monzo have both built their banking stack. Atom and Tandem bought off-shelf. And look who has stalled*
*I am in no way an expert. This is a leap.
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As far as I am aware Starling have built their own banking from scratch like Monzo, however Starling use 3rd party processing which I believe Monzo will be having in house.
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Correct - which is why we’ll be having less card processing outages 
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interesting to see that this reporters view of Starling
- "It launched consumer current accounts in beta in March 2017 and, in June, revealed it was expanding to Europe having received approval from the Bank of England to operate in Ireland under the EU’s passporting arrangements " - Starling are on the Bank of Irelands approved list of registered credit institutions
https://www.uktech.news/news/6-fintech-startups-luring-customers-away-traditional-banks-20170818
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First of all, this analysis is based on a ton of assumptions… 
Treat it lightly and don’t complain about lack of methodology!
So, elephant in the room - how many users Starling Bank has… They’ve been rather quiet about it.
I took some forum numbers from Stats pages for both Starling and Monzo:
https://community.starlingbank.com/about
About - Monzo Community
Starling stats:
Monzo stats:
We know that Monzo has 16,200 users on forum and 366,000 users on prepaid. This means that 4.4% of prepaid Monzo users also uses forum. That’s only solid data I had to go on. I also made first mistake, good analyst wouldn’t make it, but I’m just having fun 
, I ignored that someone can be community member, but not Monzo user. But also, many Starling forum users don’t have Starling account, just Monzonauts keeping tabs on Starling forum.
Now, rest is total guess work:
- If Starling’s forum users also oscilate around 4.4% of total userbase, it means that their bank has around 12,190 users
- If Starling’s users are more keen to have forum account and 8% of them is forum member, than Starling has around 6,735 users
- If Starling’s users are far less keen to have forum account and only 1% of them is a forum member, than Starling has around 56,000 users (that’s total nonsense though)
I do think that Starling might have more people on forum, percentage wise, than Monzo has. Monzo is wayyyy past that phase that majority of early adopters also contribute on forum, while Starling seems to be at this phase right now.
My best guess on the back of this totally unscientific calculations is that Starling has between 6,000 to 12,000 users. That’s quite… low. 
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There are many Starling users avoiding the forum as they can not sign in via email and password but have to use Github etc to sign in
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We know one user who is but that’s anecdotal - I’m not sure about ‘many’. I’m not sure there’s that many users who don’t use any of the social networks on offer.
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