Starling Feedback

Heaven forbid we have humour on this forum.

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Do you though ā€¦ do you :thinking:

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When they have been rude ? They always seem super nice :+1:t3:

Itā€™s the entertainment source. Great humour reading the comments .

Setting up payments/payees is a lot easier than monzo

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Interesting to see the mention of getting into insurance. It wasnā€™t too long ago that the line was they wanted to do current accounts well, so theyā€™d be sticking to this. Now we have loans and potentially insurance. Itā€™s all looking very legacy and I canā€™t see the marketplace being very successful if the companies on there are competing with the bank.

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Had a re-read of that paragraph. They are talking about offering it through the marketplace, so they would earn a fee for signups that they handle.

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I think that section is confused:

Weā€™re also looking to get into insurance. The current insurance climate is quite frankly a pain and particularly the services that you only consume annually - home insurance, car insurance etc - theyā€™re never going to get an app onto your phone but they can be a tile in the marketplace. Weā€™d even be able to take out the identity checks and form filling.

The bit in italics makes it sound like Starling wants to do insurance directly, but the bit in bold implies marketplace to me.

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The bit I found most interesting was about identity and authentication:

Rather than using your social media account to log into financial services itā€™s far more likely to use your banking identity to log into other non-financial services. We have strong anti-impersonation, KYC established identities, something the tech giants can leverage.
ā€¦
Itā€™s been happening for years on the internet using one account to log into other services, and thatā€™s what Starling wants to do with its current account, among other things, to save customers time and money.

Thereā€™s a lot of mileage in that, I think, that Monzo and others could also capitalise on.

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Surely with Open Banking this is going to be possible with almost all banks realistically, though?

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Depends how other banks handle authentication.

Nobody is going to use their banking login if the UX is a disaster and they need to remember 10 different passwords and PINs.

If they want this to go mainstream it should be as simple as ā€œLogin with Facebookā€.

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Our logins (as are Starlingā€™s) are OAuth2 :slight_smile: So yes, it could be that simple.

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Hey,

No what I meant is how you prove your identity to the identity provider itself.

Currently Monzo uses the email magic link while Starling uses a QR-code & device-based flow; but I would expect legacy banks to continue to rely on their annoying security theatre even if they were to become OAuth2 providers themselves.

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Oh for sure - OAuth will only ever be as good as the provider makes it but it is probably more helpful to think how good we (the industry) could make it, and set standards around that :slight_smile:

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It would be nice to have a somewhat secure standard for AML/KYC. As an institution that does AML/KYC checks on their customers it could then vouch for them when logging them into other sites via oAuth 2, and provide details of the KYC check (how ā€œstrongā€ it is, which regulations does it follow - as each jurisdiction has different requirements).

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For sure - this would be really interesting :slight_smile:

I believe there are already providers leveraging Open Banking to provide better and fairer credit reporting by looking at your actual account history and spending :raised_hands:

Could you please expand on why seeing my actual spending would make things ā€œbetter and fairerā€?

Sounds like data mining to me. Third parties surely donā€™t need to know what I purchase to understand Iā€™m not in debt and pay my bills on time?

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Long-term it would be better if instead previous lenders could individually vouch for you, but that would require way more work than just having a single entity getting access to your account to infer your ability to repay.

In the meantime, Iā€™d say letting a central entity know on a case-by-case basis is still better than everyone snitching and reporting to credit bureaus without asking you. The added authentication would also make identity theft difficult as youā€™d now need to OAuth with your bank to apply for credit.

I agree that it isnā€™t a perfect solution as far as privacy is concerned; and personally I still wouldnā€™t use it (same reason why Iā€™m not using CreditLadder for example, even though it sounds like a great idea on paper).

It does sound like data mining and unfortunately will probably end up being used for this. But I can see how access to your account transactions could be used to improve credit rating in the edge cases where, for example, someone has no credit history but their account shows regular income and payment of bills.

I certainly wouldnā€™t want to open up my account to third-parties, but banks already do internal rating (basically your transactions, etc.) and many will even offer products based on this alone.

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