Starling now counts 30 clients of its Banking as a Service (BaaS) offering, up from 25 in September, including SumUp, CurrencyCloud, Moneybox and, most recently, Standard Chartered. Starling’s next push is to expand BaaS into Europe, with a team based out of Ireland and led by country manager Elaine Deehan, according to altfi.com.
In September, Starling confirmed that France, Germany, The Netherlands and Spain are top of its list of European markets to start offering banking services in.
“The regulations are a little bit different, the markets are a bit different, but we’ve got experience, we’ve got an amazing technology platform, and we’re already offering customers Euro accounts,” says Helen Bierton, Starling’s chief banking officer .
“We’ve got the ability to take the currency side of it and move quickly into those markets.”
The only challenge is that Starling doesn’t yet have a regulatory route to launch its services into Europe, given its Irish banking licence application has been dragging on for nearly four years now (by AltFi’s count).
Still, that’s not holding back Bierton’s ambition. The executive reveals that Starling is committed to launching BaaS internationally, even if that means looking beyond Europe.
“We feel that this is a service that we could offer completely internationally,” she says.
“I think we may go global with this at some point.”
Bierton wouldn’t be drawn on which markets or on what timelines but says Starling will have many more BaaS announcements to come in the new year.
“I’m anticipating being able to talk to you about offering more of our services in more geographies and to more businesses.”
Banking 4.0 – „how was the experience for you”
„So many people are coming here to Bucharest, people that I see and interact on linkedin and now I get the change to meet them in person. It was like being to the Football World Cup but this was the World Cup on linkedin in payments and open banking.”
Many more interesting quotes in the video below:
