No, it means they have 1,625 customers who have a goal named “Christmas”.
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I’m one of those people. Think I’ll need to code name everything going forward 
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This would be a huge downgrade from contacted & contactless transactions.
I’m forward to eating my words on Monday
Nom nom nom!
app requires authentication to get into thus is more secure than a contactless card
Banks are happy to take the risk (remember, you’re not liable for contactless fraud) to offer convenience, and frankly contactless fraud is nothing compared to the elephant in the room, aka online, card-not-present fraud.
it’s very easy to scan a qr code
Maybe in perfect conditions, yes. Try taking a sharp picture of the ticket machine (that’s where the hypothetical QR code would be) in a London bus at night. Good luck.
I won’t have to continuously try to point somewhere for a customers contactless to work
Isn’t it the same issue as with contactless? “Scan this” vs “tap your card here”? The main issue there is that some people have no clue how contactless works and that’s why you get read failures; QR codes wouldn’t solve this, if anything it would make it even worse because there’s way more complexity on a phone than on a contactless card. There is a thousand things you can click on a phone that will bring up the wrong page and/or close the QR code scanning interface. A contactless card is easy in comparison.
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Just looked at the Starling FAQ and was gob-smacked to see this:
I need a paper statement, do you supply these?
Digital statements are available in app and can be downloaded right now as a PDF / CSV. If you need a certified paper statement, we can supply these for £20 per request which can take up to 5 working days.
Hopefully, I will never need a certified paper statement!
Waiting for them to give your money is the painful bit.
Monzo or any modern bank makes this super easy.
Visa and Mastercard should be cutting down on that type of fraud with visa tokenisation soon also
How? By contactless fraud I meant someone stealing your card (or “finding” your lost card) and going on a spending spree taking advantage of the lack of PIN for low-value contactless transactions. Pre-play attacks have already been mitigated as far as I know, and they never were a significant figure even worth investigating anyway.
it doesn’t have to be used in places with low light environment, or you could just add lights.
But again, why complicate things when there’s already a technology that works just fine without lights (not to mention the added authentication)?
If they manage to full on shut the app I doubt they’ll be using contactless anyways tbh
I know plenty of people that barely manage to use a smartphone but are just fine using contactless (not that this excuses not being able to use a smartphone in 2018 btw, but that’s a rant for another day). Not to mention, doing payments over a phone app means the phone needs to be secure, something which is a huge issue with people who click on & install everything (seems like the more shady it looks the more they will click on it), and the disastrous situation of Android updates (or rather the lack of them).
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Hopefully, I will never need a certified paper statement!
Print the PDF and pass it off as original (because it is an original). Not really sure what “certified” means in this case, I mean unless they need extra information or a hand-written note from the bank, the PDF should be enough because it’s got all the information they’re looking for anyway.
I disagree with some of Starling’s business practices but I really don’t see anything wrong with this one. Why should they be footing the bill to put up with some legacy company’s bullshit because they still somehow believe (or are made to believe) a “certified” statement is somehow more secure, without actually authenticating it (and if they do want to authenticate it, they can do exactly the same with a normal PDF).
This seems like revenge; which is inline with Starling’s somewhat legacy mindset. But I doubt it’ll make a big impact in the grand scheme of things, most people probably aren’t even aware you can close the account, they’d just delete the app and never use it again so maybe only like 5% of their customers will ever be affected by this.
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Ive never come across a company thats asked for a “certified” pdf. Any times ive been asked a normal pdf has worked 
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The only downside I see with charging for statements is that if the banks see this as another revenue stream (some legacy one definitely do - Nationwide for example charged me 5£ to print out statements despite them already having branches & stuff, not to mention the statement looked exactly the same as the PDF), I could see them leaving the situation as-is on purpose instead of working on a way to allow anyone to request/authenticate statements digitally via the API (something like a push notification "Company X wants to access your last statement. Allow/deny?).
However I don’t think Starling is that bad (and I expect most of their customers to be fully digital and frown upon paper statements just as much as I do) so I don’t think this will reach anywhere close to a “revenue stream” for them and that’s good.
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Is that all ATM withdrawals - no limit? I thought they also had a limit in place… hmmm…
They have daily limits for security purposes (and it doesn’t even differentiate between local and foreign ATMs) but other than that is is unlimited (for now at least).
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I think it’s more to do with the cost factor of people closing / re-opening accounts
But that is my point, with a fully digital bank there is no cost associated to closing/re-opening accounts, it’s literally just flipping a flag in the database. My closed Starling account for example is still accessible via the API, and if it wasn’t for the is_active flag being set to “No” the app would let me login.
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Someone from starling has stated they aren’t interested in people who switch all the time to the newest shiny thing as they aren’t profitable customers.
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One thing that always gets me is the amount of super weird and different types of implementations of where the NFC reader bit on a card reader is. 95% of them are the “tap the screen” type… But every now and again I come across a new one and it can be confusing!
on the WePay / QR code thing, I read that it’s a really great system as, at the receiving payment end, it means you don’t require any hardware, contracts, terminals, readers or whatever - just a QR code on paper for your customers to scan.
I do like the idea of it.
Certified statement ?!
I contacted Barclays and Nationwide last year about statements. They replied that I can download them from online banking or they can send me SAME statements…
So Starling wanna charge for printing and postage ?
That’s fine. Why they have to spend money for sending statements to everyone?! I can buy printer for £20 
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I’m glad to see Post Office deposits have finally been launched; it seems like a Monzo announcement has spurred Starling into action yet again (or it could be a coincidence 
).
Not having cheque deposits is a bit of a shame, but I imagine cheque imaging will eventually follow (when is Monzo due to launch it? 
). However, comparing the implementation details (cost, limits, etc.) it’s clear Starling has a huge advantage. We’ll have to see how it works in practice, but right now Monzo’s cash deposit offering isn’t even in the same league as the options Starling will have.
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I’m aware Starling have been working on this for a while; it just seems they always launch stuff just before Monzo.
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