erm…i think you have the wrong company there.
Try… Global Processing Services (GPS)
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Not upset at all - I legitimately want to support Starling as I believe competition is good, so I can still have a non-legacy bank to recommend for those people for which Monzo doesn’t cut it. However, I can’t recommend Starling at the moment because it will have a counterproductive effect - if the card fails in the hands of the users, most won’t say “Starling is bad”, they will say “fintech is bad” and will forever stick to legacy. I don’t want that happening as it’s bad for all fintechs - Starling, Revolut, Monzo, etc.
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My bad, always thought it stood for Prepaid Services. The rest of my point still stands though, monthly card outages for a bank (not a prepaid card) is unacceptable especially when there’s no resolution in sight (they have never posted any postmortem or anything, besides legacy-style bullshit about how they’re committed to offering good service etc… for the same thing to happen again next month).
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I’ll reiterate my earlier post… I have not experienced one failure of card processing. Nor have l seen alerts. Nor looking through the Starling status page do l see anything (although it does only go back to start of March).
Nor have l seen the count of posts on this Starling feedback page increase exponentially, which is usually the most reliable indicator of a Starling outage…
I do recall late 2017 there was a shed load of issues but in my experience and l use my Starling card 3-4 times a day l recall nothing since the start of 2018.
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Nor have l seen alerts
They have intentionally disabled alerting on their status page, and there are complaints about it on their community if you search (unless they deleted those too). It used to be that you could subscribe to SMS alerts from their status page, but shortly after an outage the feature mysteriously disappeared.
Nor looking through the Starling status page do l see anything (although it does only go back to start of March).
Starling delete the incident history once the outage is over so it’s not a good indicator; however if you check their community you’ll see a bunch of complaints as well as totally unacceptable downplaying of the outage because “80% of transactions succeeded” (so 20% of transactions failing is no big deal for them).
Personally I used Starling for a month in August 17’ and I have not experienced an outage either, but wouldn’t trust them given the above - not only do they have an unreliable card processor but they also tamper with the status page which is totally unacceptable IMO.
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Starling used to have for a short period of time a status flash in the top left hand side of their feed which showed the current account status, which I thought was a great feature , but seems to have disappeared for some reason - not appearing on my feed now - do I need to upgrade to latest app ?
The heartbeat line thingy?
It appears when there is an outage. Or when there is a planned outage. I recall reading somewhere
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ah - I thought it was on all the time to show the account status , my mistake - didn’t realise it was only displayed when the account wouldn’t work 
- you would know that by the card not being accepted - presumably everybody gets a notification of the card not working still ?
I think it makes better sense to have it there all the time myself. With some indicator of an ‘event’ a red glow prehaps 
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I think it would be great all the time also - and presumably cheaper than sending out notifications which I believe was used as the reason not to send out notifications for outages some time ago on the forum
I believe was used as the reason not to send out notifications for outages some time ago on the forum
Come on, don’t tell me you actually believe in that bullshit. The costs of notifying 100k customers by text are negligible - hell even as an individual I could afford it, don’t tell me a bank can’t. Let’s take a quick look at SMS pricing from a popular carrier; we see 0.04$ per outbound text for “pay as you go” pricing; if we assume 100k customers that gives us 4k$. With “committed volume” pricing the cost per text will be even lower, below 0.01$/text, making it even cheaper.
The real reason for the lack of notifications is that they know full well that an unreliable card doesn’t make them look like a serious bank, and they’re trying everything they can to sweep any traces of the outages under the rug. This might work on the short-term but the truth will eventually still surface and they will have to change strategies and actually fix the issues, or else customers will run away.
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It’s well known that Starling delete comments about outages and also alter their status pages
I remember this one time they claimed to have sent engineers to the GPS offices to fix the outage 
oh and when they blamed another company for too many transactions that caused another outage
https://community.starlingbank.com/t/update-on-todays-card-issues/2128/26?u=danny
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Looking at their status page it does include historical scheduled and unplanned downtime. I do recall at one point, as you say, they removed the status after it was resolved thereby making it look as if nothing had ever happened.
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Your stance on Starling is awfully strong considering you only used them for a month.
I imagine if people gave Monzo a 1 month period to prove their worth, it wouldn’t be a true indication of the company/product.
Although if you fundamentally disagree with things they say/do (which you said previously) - That’s fair enough.
I’m just not sure you are well placed to comment on Starling’s progress/usability/user experience.
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I imagine if people gave Monzo a 1 month period to prove their worth, it wouldn’t be a true indication of the company/product.
True, I guess I have a bias towards Monzo, but the thing is, I’m not that upset about Starling’s outages (Monzo has those as well), it’s more about their attitude towards them. Monzo looks like they actually want to fix them, Starling just dismiss it and do some things which I believe are unacceptable like trying to downplay/hide the outages.
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I guess it comes down to what you are looking for in the bank - If that’s important to you, completely understandable.
I’m a huge Apple fan - If things don’t work… It’s because we are holding it wrong 
But I believe there’s a difference between a product with known limitations (like iPhones lacking features that are common on Android) or bugs that you know about and can work around (“holding it wrong”) and a product where it sounds exciting on paper (a brand new bank that’s supposed to be reliable, and will do their best to prevent eventual outages from happening again) but doesn’t deliver in reality (they still don’t want to eliminate the source of the outages - GPS - despite being affected multiple times).
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OK, whilst your statement is correct (in theory), it falls down in practice.
You are basing your information on their forum I’m assuming? Because, you have said yourself, in the entire month you used it, you never had a failure? Granted, it’s only 1 month… But I’m struggling to see why that side of it is something you feel strongly about… when it never happened to you?
The second issue is there are people on this thread (and on the Starling forum), who have said… “I’ve never experienced an outage” - In fact, some people are saying they have experienced more issues/outages with Monzo!
Just because Monzo tell you what happened, doesn’t make it a better situation. It might make it easier to understand, but I’d be equally concerned with new bugs which keep popping up, than the same bug that happens over again.
Don’t get me wrong, you are perfectly entitled to your opinion, and this is a Monzo forum, not a Starling one, so I appreciate the bias will always be towards them.
From my experience of using both, and taking everything into consideration - I still see Starling as the more exciting of the 2, purely because it gets things done quicker (in general) - I’ve always been an early adopter of technology, and I’ve come to live with the shortfalls of getting to the party first, when there may be some issues to iron out.
I still recommend Monzo as well as Starling, and a lot of my family use it.
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Personally I’ve never quite understood this logic. I mean surely you can see the flaw with that statement?
Just because you haven’t been effected by something doesn’t mean you should stop caring if something is wrong, and just accept things the way they are. Right?
I think dismissing something because you haven’t been effected is really quite insular. Granted it’s a more carefree attitude to have, but personally I see an issue as an issue, regardless of who and what causes it.
Just my opinion anyway.
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But I’m struggling to see why that side of it is something you feel strongly about… when it never happened to you?
Because I really don’t want it to happen to me ever. I have backup cards but they have nowhere near enough money on them as my current account, so I don’t want to be caught off-guard by an outage.
I give Monzo a pass because (at the very least it looks like) every time they have an outage they are taking actions to fix it, so I hope that after a few times all the bugs would’ve been ironed out and no more outages.
Starling on the other hand has shown no desire to fix the root cause of the problem, and is actually making matters worse by trying to downplay the impact of the incidents.