If it was a test, I’d highly doubt that they’d publicise it.
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ok bad wording. Maybe I should have just said we don’t know the details of the contact or length.
I just find it interesting mastercard would choose (not to be rude to them) such a small player in the market for something like this.
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Yeah but don’t forget, connections can make things happen that may seem impossible. Anne Boden is an industry veteran and probably knows the bosses at the card networks. Such contacts can influence they way in which they look at Starling.
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They have (or at least purport to have) a highly scalable platform and have proven that they are able to successfully build a bank from the ground up in a short time frame.
Another advantage for MasterCard, they will be one of Starlings principal customers and will be able to demand a large amount of their attention - not so much if you’re dealing with somebody like HSBC.
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What is the new service trying to do? It basically seems like a copy of FPS but for day to day transactions. Maybe I read it wrong as it goes on to talk about payroll and how BACS takes time? Why not use FPS anyway?
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It’s the bit that sits before FPS.
Say you were building an app that needed to send money to somebody, you can’t just connect to FPS. You’d need to use a service like this when then itself connects to FPS
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Ahh ok I see. I presumed there was a variety of services offering this already. But makes sense thanks 
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Yeah that makes sense - but Starling already offers this service - so I don’t see the point of “putting another man in the middle”.
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That’s often the way, but the middle men always manage to slot themselves in and make themselves quite a bit of money out of it
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I wonder why can’t FPS just provide the service directly. Like when I need to talk to Facebook’s or Twitter’s API I don’t need to go through an useless middleman, so why complicate things here?
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You need a bank with access to s settlement account at the BoE, which in this case is Starling. From what I understand, Starling already offers what MasterCard Send aims to provide.
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I guess they do, you just need to be a licensed bank and meet loads of other criteria to get an API key.
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Couldn’t mastercard just achieve this without even using starling. To me it just sounds like a rebranded service starling already offer.
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MasterCard is in a certain way a big legacy company, and those aren’t known for delivering good software quickly. It makes sense for them to just let Starling handle it especially if they’ve already built the integration.
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They would need to get a banking license or e-money license (TransferWise us the first non-bank to have gained direct access to the Faster Payments scheme), which would mean more work and money would need to be spent. Starling already has this capability, so it makes sense.
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Makes sense. I was looking at it from the other point of view whereby they have the money they are huge! Why bother paying starling for something they can put together themselves with a few months work.
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Presumed they already had this type of licence as they handle money. Makes sense as these can take ages to get.
Edit: oh look it’s my cakeday!
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Mastercard Send is a service for businesses that make a lot of outgoing bank transfers, for example insurers (claim payouts) and payroll providers (wages).
These companies currently send payments using batch systems, which is slow, admin intensive and costly. Mastercard Send is a service where these businesses can set up an account, deposit a sum of money and then make outgoing bank transfers, on demand, via an API of some kind I think.
The fact Starling have been chosen as the UK banking partner is quite significant, it means these deposits (likely many £millions for an insurer) will be made to Starling, and Starling will hold the funds and handle the transfers and settlements for Mastercard. As for how much Starling earns from this, that is between them and Mastercard.
As for how this benefits individual consumers, it doesn’t directly. However, it does benefit Starling. Large contracts like this will help Starling reach profitability far more quickly than other challenger banks and will make it far more likely that Starling will continue to provide costly features to their account holders at no charge. They will be able to absorb the costs of these features.
I really like this business model, there are many ways to make money if you have a banking licence, and Starling are right to exploit their licence in every way possible. If they were to focus just on a current account, they would end up burning investor money very quickly, introducing fees left, right and centre, and possibly even get desperate and start begging customers to not use features which cost them money.
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Thank you for this! I couldn’t wrap my head around what Mastercard Send was supposed to do, but now it makes sense!
Me too! It also means less reliance on creepy advertisements the marketplace for revenue which is also a good thing in my book.
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That is really good news for Starling and for their customers as that might boost confidence in the bank
In unrelated to the previous news feedback - I was getting my statements from both Monzo and Starling yesterday as I needed to provide them to FD as I am remortgaging, and I was amazed at how Starling ask for your password for every single one of them - that does not make any sense at all! I know it is very tiny annoyance but it is something that I hope they sort out.
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