Savings get real with Starling Bank and Moneybox
Megan Caywood, Starling’s chief platform officer
UK challenger bank Starling has teamed up with Moneybox to give its customers access to a suite of saving and investing tools.
Starling says it is the first digital challenger to join the list of banks supported by the Moneybox app for its “round ups” feature. The service will be available to Starling customers at the end of April. Its customers will be able to link an account to Moneybox, round up their purchases to the nearest pound and invest the spare change.
Megan Caywood, Starling’s chief platform officer, says: “People today want to not only manage their everyday money on their phone but their savings and investments too.”
This latest development is made possible through Starling’s open APIs. This month it unveiled its developer portal to enable third parties to access customer data and build on top of its platform using API. Moneybox is the first to launch a live integration on this API.
For Starling’s customers, transactions will appear within the Moneybox app in real time as they spend. The app will request authorisation from Starling; and once the new user has tapped agree, the signup process is complete. This will work in a similar way to logging into other apps and services with Facebook and Google.
Elsewhere, the bank launched its mobile app and is welcoming the first customers through its digital doors to join a beta testing programme. It also recently concluded its first hackathon, opening up its API to outside developers.
