Starling's Marketplace

[alexs (Alex Sherwood)]

Ok here goes

@alexs

Starling can share data to streamline setup of the other app (so you don’t have to enter in duplicate information to setup an account with that app that Starling can share across for you), but then you’ll go about setting up and using that app as you normally would.

As we know, a big part of the challenger’s appeal is better user experience & I’m a big fan of functionality like this, which removes friction from the signup process.
At the July open office Tom mentioned that the Monzo marketplace might include a rating for providers, based on how easy they make it to sign up to their products. Obviously that’ll motivate them to accommodate that sort of functionality as much as possible, which is brilliant

@alexs

After you’ve setup that app - say an ISA in Wealthify - then when you return to the Starling app you’ll have a dashboard to show you some high level details about that connected product. The dashboard for Wealthify under “Savings and Investments”, for example, will show information such as Total Value of the ISA, Total Growth, Risk Level, and amount of the Standing Order, and will let you do basic actions like “Add Money” to the ISA.

We know that this sort of functionality is on the way for Monzo users too, as it was included in Hugo’s Pots sneak peak. I believe that frictionless access to & management of these services, from a single place (the current account), is going to become more & more important as users start adopting more & more products from different providers.

@alexs

Each category in the Marketplace will have a unique dashboard that relates to it, to show you some high level data about the products you have connected to Starling.

I’ll be interested to see how this works out. In theory it’s useful but it could be difficult to aggregate the data from multiple providers & still provide meaningful insights to users.

@alexs

In some cases, the apps available in the Marketplace won’t require the opening of another app, and the flow will happen entirely within Starling, but generally this won’t be the case. There are a few reasons for this model, a main one being that we want to enable partners to be able to join the Marketplace quickly and easily. In this model, since we have a standardised dashboard for each category, we can enable partners to easily integrate our API and to also identify the API requirements to plug into the Marketplace dashboard. This is a big part of our goal to enable transparency and choice for our customers.

This is key, in my opinion because it enables providers to quickly integrate with the marketplace which means that users will have a wider selection of products / services to choose from. I’ve been making the case for that here too.

@alexs

We’re building a platform that enables any number of providers to plug into it, and in the future we’ll look to additionally use data and machine learning to increasingly help customers find and choose the best products for them.

We know that this is on the way from Monzo too

@alexs

For example, if someone is using Starling as their primary account and we have insight into their spending, then we will automatically be able to complete an affordability assessment to pre-approve them for lines of credit. Then, when they go to access a loan in the Marketplace, they won’t have to fill in any forms and we’ll be able to automatically scour the market for the best deal on their behalf.

This is where it gets really interesting though, I’m really excited to see just how much the challengers can leverage user’s data, for their benefit.

My only concern is quite how far Monzo takes the recommendation engine. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m keen to have a choice of every integrated service, from every provider, rather than having to choose from Monzo’s selections. It sounds like Starling are taking the former approach

Last comment - obviously the UI is pretty basic but it looks like it’ll do the job for now.

Overall, I’m impressed it’ll be interesting to see which has the bigger draw - a better app, with a fewer integrations initially (Monzo) or Starling’s app & more integrations via the marketplace. I’m also wondering how quickly Monzo can catch up, once the API is ready..time will tell.