For too long, business banking has been expensive, time-consuming and complicated. In March 2018, we launched the UK’s first mobile-only business accounts with a clear aim: to save small businesses time and money.
Our business accounts have all the features you’d expect from a licenced bank - payments, standing orders, cash deposits through the Post Office - plus all the money management features you’d expect from a challenger bank determined to shake up the industry for the better. No more monthly fees, no more three-week waits, no more endless paperwork.
Don’t believe us? Keep reading to hear from three of our business customers, all of whom focus on helping others achieve their potential and develop their projects.
Gareth Thomas started his first business at 14, building websites for clients from his parents’ attic. At 21, he co-founded Reserve, one of the most successful holiday apartment agencies in Scotland. Today, he is the director of Clarified, passing on lessons learned to other small businesses. Gareth, 32, is also the single foster carer to three children.
He first heard about Starling at an event in Cardiff where our founder and CEO Anne Boden was speaking. He later looked into challenger banks and chose Starling when he found that it was the only one to offer both personal and business accounts from the same app. “It suits me down to the ground,” he says. “I jumped at the chance and couldn’t believe how slick the process was to sign up. In comparison to other banking apps, Starling is on another planet,” he says. “I’m recommending it to anyone and everyone that I meet.”
Ash Phillips, like Gareth, “fell out of love with high street banks. One of the things that really bugged me is that whenever I had a requirement on anything I had to go through my business bank manager and whenever he went away, it strangled the process - there was no efficiency, it was just crazy.” Ash, 28, is the founder and director of Yena, a membership organisation for startups that runs more than 100 events a year.
Ash was an early adopter of the Starling personal account and signed up for a Starling business account soon after they were launched. He used Starling when Yena was running an event in Rome. “I recently used Starling for travel expenses in Italy,” he says. “It was great to see what I spent and no fees abroad was awesome for me. Plus in Rome I wasn’t wandering around with cash - I could use the card for everything, and if the card had been lost or stolen, I could lock it from the app.”
Mariam Jimoh also runs a personal and professional development network, in her case focusing on businesses owned by black women. She set up the Women in the City Afro-Caribbean Network, known as WCAN, when she was 21 during her final year at the University College London (UCL). Her aim was to create a community for young, ambitious women like herself to support and learn from each other as they started their careers.
Mariam, 26, now works full-time in investment banking and uses Staring to manage the finances for WCAN, where she continues to be director. “I like that you can monitor your spending, see the merchants you’ve interacted with and add more than one bank account for each payee,” she says. “I use Goals for budgeting and have a bucket for this and that so we can work out how much we should be spending on different things that year,” she says. “It’s everything I need.”