Discussion
Salt Bank is Romania’s first digital-native bank, and it’s powered by Engine. The bank was built and launched in just under 12-months, a remarkable feat and I thought I would share a few reflections on the journey so far.
Our first meeting with the Salt Bank team was memorable for a number of reasons. CEO Gabriela Nistor and her team came to London for a full day workshop to discuss their vision to build Romania’s first digitally native bank and the capabilities of the Engine platform to deliver a compelling and personalised proposition, like Starling, rapidly to customers. Sitting there in-person with Salt and the rest of the Engine team, I had a real feeling of déjà vu. Gabriela is in some ways quite similar to Starling founder Anne Boden, with the same habit of asking penetrating questions to really drill into the detail (read: gave the Engine team a real grilling). She had the same easy manner when interacting with her team too. I had flashbacks to the early days of Starling Bank, when responsible for product engineering, we focussed on every little challenge in the run up to our launch. I was left with the firm impression that the Salt Bank team had a real understanding of the business they were trying to launch, their operating model and the transformation they wanted to achieve.
What I really liked was that Gabriela and her team were focused on Salt Bank having a similar impact on the customer as Starling. They wanted to solve problems for customers rather than selling them a bunch of services they didn’t necessarily need. This had been the ethos at Starling from the beginning. It was about building trusted relationships, rather than growth at all costs. It has always been a real differentiator for Starling and we’d been doing the same thing with Engine, forming a trusted brand, to create partnerships in the market. When we make a commitment, we deliver to it.
Two years ago, when we launched Engine as a Software-as-a-Service subsidiary of Starling Bank, there were just two of us in the team, myself and Chief Product Officer Victoria Newton. The impetus for the move had been that, once Starling Bank had become well established, executives from all over the world had begun turning up at our offices asking how we’d done it. We were, indeed still are, a rarity as a neo bank, in that we had not only managed to scale, but were also profitable. Oh, and we also had established a place at the top of the customer satisfaction table. A lot of those conversations ended with variations on a request to work together. After a while we thought, maybe we should do this, create a product that can be taken to other markets and make best use of the incredible technology we’ve created. By this, I mean not just the bells and whistles that people see when they use the app, but the behind-the-scenes tech that allows us to cost effectively deliver all these good service outcomes. This is how Engine came to life.
The Engine model we built takes the systems and the knowledge of Starling Bank and offers it to other banks and fintechs. By working with us, our partners get access to the same simple, intuitive platform with its extensive range of personalised products for both retail customers and small business owners. What makes it attractive from the end-user point of view is that it is made to solve their problems. The advantage for our partner organisations, aside from giving their customers a great user experience, is they have all the tools in the back office to operate everything, from integrated chat and call handling, to back office processes such as card operations and financial crime alerts. It's all in one single interface with easy-to-follow, yet detailed, insights into the customer and their products.
The big question when we started Engine was; would anyone be willing to adopt proven processes, rather than adapt technology to their current approach? Yes, we had many admirers asking how we’d built Starling, but that is a world away from persuading a bank to completely transfer their core systems. It’s been well documented that many banks are running off systems that are two, three, even four decades old, but there have been some high profile failures when banks have taken the plunge to make any significant changes. There are those that think it is a brave executive indeed that signs off on a tech transformation project. As it turned out, the answer to the question was ‘yes’ and the response came back to us much more strongly than we anticipated. As well as Salt Bank, we are also working with AMP Bank in Australia.
One area which we did need to address was delivery timescales. It was inevitable that most management teams would be reluctant to sign off on a three year project to transform their banking offer, or indeed to launch an entirely new bank. For an investment of this scale, they would want to realise the value in the short term and, of course, be certain it was going to achieve what it needed to do. Fine, we said, we can get a bank live in twelve months. It was an ambitious timetable, yes, but we believed we could do it and it would be a real differentiator for Engine.
The project with Salt Bank is proof of principle. Within a period of twelve months we have been able to give our partners access to all the elements that took Starling a few years to build, because we were implementing what we had already built and integrated. With Starling we were learning how to deliver the system as we went along, dealing with circumstances we had not navigated before. Now we were dealing with a proven documented system. It has helped too that Gabriela and her team have remained as challenging over the detail as they were during that first session. This is what is needed to make a business like this work.
Culturally, Engine and Salt Bank are a perfect fit and that has helped the process go smoothly too. We are also very familiar with European banking regulations, not least because we shared them up until very recently.
In the run up to going live, Salt Bank tested using friends and family, rather as we did in the early days of Starling, and employed a pre-enrollment program for customers to gain early access as ‘Founders’ with 80,000 enrolled before public launch. I know at the moment of flicking the switch to go live, Gabriela and team will be immensely proud, this was a button pushing task I took when Starling went live, eight years ago, and I can still remember the excitement of doing so.
The launch event on Thursday 4th April was a truly impressive affair, and it was almost overwhelming to see everything the Salt team had worked towards come to life.
There have been some challenges, not least the ambitious timetable, but it has been a hugely pleasurable experience. Most people don’t get to launch one business like Starling in their lifetime, and watch it grow from 30-something people to over 3000. To do something similar again is fantastic.
If you’re interested in learning more, you can read about the project here.