Pretty surprised at this - any thoughts @Freetrade_Team1 ?
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The timing was a surprise but not them closing it. Last few weeks they’ve deleted threads where there was criticism and tried to introduce log in tied to the account so they were clearly struggling with the open community concept
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What she said 
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They never seemed fully onboard with having a community - didn’t really engage much with feedback and seemed to delete threads frequently. So this is not a huge surprise. I’ve been trying their app for business for the last year, but it’s not really suited for business use ( basic stuff like a UI focussed in daily transactions and categories based on personal banking ), so I’m thinking of going back to Tide.
That said scaling a community and dealing with the inevitable undesirables and distinguishing trolls from legitimate complaints becomes more and more difficult as a company scales the user base - I don’t find the Monzo forum as interesting as previously because it’s more full of in jokes and off topic discussions from regulars in massive unreadable threads, which will probably deteriorate further as the community grows. It’s tricky to get the balance right but I do think there’s lots of valuable feedback from customers in forums like these.
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It must be the investor in me but all I read in that statement was nearly 250,000 accounts. That is far less than I thought they would have at this time.
Is this signalling trouble at Starling?
They’re growing still, just their user growth is slower than Monzo’s but confused by this Starling to help RBS develop digital bank.
Edit - I know it says they’ll use Starling’s API service but I’d have thought RBS has all the plumbing already.
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My prediction is that Banking as a Service play - giving other companies, FinTechs & apparently, incumbents - access to banking services like Faster Payments, will be the bit of their business that really takes off.
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Yes but surely RBS has all the plumbing, the issue with RBS is the cool factor, no?
You’d have thought so but perhaps it’s built into a legacy technology stack, which means they can’t access it easily for this new project? Whereas Starling has built theirs with APIs to make it easy to connect to.
Yes that’s an issue for them too. It’ll be interesting to see how they try to solve it.
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Sounds like a expensive way to start, unless RBS is using Starling to be experiment and if it goes well they’ll roll their own.
Also Starling ( challenger bank ) is already losing money whilst owning their tech, they would be losing even more if they were licensing it from someone… maybe Starling’s exit is to get acquired by a bigger bank.
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I think the forums are great, I love that Freetrade also do this … please Freetrade continue to invest in the community, don’t let it die or be censored.
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Some Starling Community refugees have started a new discussion place here:
https://community.fintechtalk.co.uk/
Discourse, so very familiar.
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RBS’s plumbing is awful…
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