I always think the same with Monzo’s CA and Apple Pay 
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Monzo.me ApplePay support is broken so this is something I’ll be using Starling for from now on till Monzo sort it out!
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Do Starling have CASS coz I wanna CASS from Monzo to Starling
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Yes
Sweet!
I’m gonna try it
Agreed, especially from the bank that can’t even log you in consistently!
And there’s little they’ve innovated with or being first with - what wasnt monzo, tide, or anyone else etc doing before them. Goals and applepay?
I cant work out if this is deliberate to avoid people leaving and keep the numbers up OR if its just because they have built in in a way they can’t allow it.
I find this too - “look how amazing anne is” or " look what she’s done" - haven’t seen anything about how good the bank is or what its trying to do. Just endless PR about her moving from AIB.
I’ve used starling since launch and i’m pretty much done with them now. As soon as monzo do apple pay i’ll have no reason for it.
Some of the reasons
- Horrendous login process which still isnt fixed months later, despite several promises to be.
- I’ve had multiple errors including telling me my password is wrong when it wasn’t (finally confirmed recently as a bug and supposedly solved)
- Being told password is incorrect but then allowing access anyway with the wrong password
- The pulse being incorrect and not updating correctly (ranging from not updating quickly enough to transaction showing on wrong days or disappearing altogether if refunded).
- Notifications missing
- Requiring passwords for menial tasks like updating a picture - but then allowing all kinds of things to happen by messaging customer service which doesn’t need any password.
- Little action on feedback
- Service is poor
- I’m locked out and its a pain to reset (and i’m locked out again because of the error above)
- Doesn’t seem to be any focus - why would i want a business account when you cant even sort the personal account out properly.
- Taking months to correct logos and transaction data
- Not allowing transfers of less then £1 - (luckily this is broken too so has also been working)
I like the in app card which has the details - that’s honestly the best thing i can say about them.
In a lot of places the starling app looks much more polished then Monzo, but it doesn’t pull off the functionality and usability. Which is a shame and a big miss from them. Personally i’m tired of it. They’ve recently announced you can now say thankyou for receiving starling settle up payments. Both settle up and thankyou being directly copied from monzo. (and i think these are both gimmicks on monzo too for reference). But i wonder if thats innovation then there’s not much hope at them looking at the above or doing anything much more interesting.
It’s not good enough to replace the legacy bank which does the majority of things equally as well but also consistently.
For the other stuff - basically instant notifications and transactions its outclassed by monzo which has been flawless in the entire time i’ve used it, which is over a longer period of time.
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Does anyone know why Starling would want to prevent a customer from ever ever having another account? Where is the business case for that?
This is from their FAQs
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The costs of opening and closing accounts are quite big in the grand scheme of things, especially given the data retention laws that financial companies have to adhere to, so I am not surprised that they are banning what are effectively repeat sign ups given that it will double their reporting costs for you a customer.
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Or the ease of opening one just to switch to a bank who offer an opening bribe?
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that’s what I did with my starling account… #Guilty
Although besides that I didn’t like the UI of the app anyway.
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Part of the reason is the cost of retaining data about the closed account, as it can not be distroyed straight away (even if customers request that).
Financial law and regulation mandates that banks must store your data for five to six years after closing an account.
For personally identifiable information (PII), this is five years.
Legislation that underpins this is the EU’s Forth Anti-Money Laundering Directive enacted on 25 June 2015, which member states (of which UK is still one) had to be compliant with by the 26 June 2017 (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:JOL_2015_141_R_0003&from=ES)
The UK implementation of this was The Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing and Transfer of Funds (Information on the Payer) Regulations 2017 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2017/692/contents/made). This updates and expands upon the The Money Laundering Regulations of 2007 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2007/2157/regulation/19/made)
For all other information relating to an account holder it is six years to reflect the Limitation Act (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1980/58) i.e. how long you could bring a claim against a bank for a breach of contract) or raise a compaint with the Financial Ombudsman Service (https://www.handbook.fca.org.uk/handbook/DISP/INTRO/?view=chapter)
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However, there is some contradictory info in the Starling forum that implies the ban may not be permanent and they may consider a reapplication after 12 months has elapsed. Though it is my assumption this is a manual process and not automatic.
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I doubt it’s about data retention issues; in the grand scheme of things, once you’re compliant with all the regulations, it doesn’t matter whether you’re storing 1GB or 10GB of data. An entire account’s data over an individual’s lifetime can be expressed in a handful of megabytes, so it’s not the storage costs for sure; those are negligible.
From an engineering perspective it’s most likely they just didn’t build the app (as in the server-side backend, the mobile app couldn’t care less) to allow an account in a closed state to be reopened, which makes sense as it’s extra work; I’ve made the same tradeoff on a project I’m working on right now. In the rare case an user with a closed account wants to reopen one I just tell them to create another account.
The code can be adapted to handle reopening accounts later on if there’s a business case for it but at the early stages when engineering resource is limited it wasn’t considered a priority. Starling is most likely the same.
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I’m pretty sure I saw something about it winning best bank and best current account…maybe not though.
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Yep they did indeed win an award, pitted against legacy banks; it’s a bit of an unfair comparison though, as even the worst challenger bank will blow any legacy one out the water. It’s like comparing 8-bit consoles against a brand new PlayStation 4 - of course the PS4 is gonna win.
I think they should’ve made two competitions, one for challengers and one for legacy.
Oh and actually, I’m harsh when I compare legacy banks to 8-bit consoles. The consoles are actually running newer code than most legacy banks. 
Natwest…best app…comes with a free calculator thingy 
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Best app in the race to the bottom that is legacy banking.
Surprised this went under the radar…
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/25/starling-wealthify/
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Well I never just recently sold up at Weathify, not happy with their performance returned to Nutmeg, but with Freetrade about to launch their product what better than partnering them with Monzo. I could replicate my Nutmeg portfolio at no cost, now there’s a thought.
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