Anyone tried Starling Bank?

EarthBoy

Mr_Goodkat wrote: »

Does anyone know if you can fund your Starling account with a credit card rahter than a debit card and if so is it treated as a purchase or a cash advance by the issuing credit card company?


The app seems to let me select a credit card and have got as far as the final stage of submitting the payment but wondered if anyone had tried this out before I did?

Anthorn wrote: »

I think that what Mr. Goodkat is referring to is that a credit card could be used in place of a debit card in the top-up section of the app even though that section specifically says "Debit Card".

If what is meant is that there is a screen following the debit card screen which allows top-up with a credit card then I don't have it and I have just looked at it again.

I don't think Mr Goodkat is getting another screen, I understand him to mean that he lies, basically, and selects top up by debit card but actually enters his credit card number instead, and he was wondering if the top-up/transfer would work. I don't know, but I suspect that Starling's systems would recognise that the card number is a credit card, not a debit card, and the transaction would fail at the last stage.

SnowTiger

Starling Bank's app now allows punters to transfer as little as 1p, which should please at least one person here.

Starling Bank is also offering loans. It appears that customers can take out a loan up to the value of their unused overdraft. Loan APR will be lower than overdraft APR.

Anthorn

Starling Bank Mastercard debit card problem today and it hit me hard: Card declined in Iceland, Sainsbury's Bank ATM declined, Lloyds Bank ATM declined. The only place I've seen this problem reported is in the Starling Bank app and that report too has disappeared since I dismissed it.

Quite frankly if this problem is confined to Starling Bank I won't be with Starling next week because it will have reached the ranks of the unreliable. Hey, at this time even TSB looks to be more reliable than Starling Bank.

Well, that's my weekend away completely ruined!

EDIT:
Looks like the problem reported above is unique to Starling Bank. Bye-bye Starling Bank. Been great knowing you if only for a short time:

Resolved
This incident has been resolved.
Posted about 1 hour ago. Aug 17, 2018 - 14:27 UTC
Investigating
We're sorry we had an issue with some of our cards and a few transactions were declined. We are now processing normally again. Please contact us if you experience any problems.
Posted about 2 hours ago. Aug 17, 2018 - 13:47 UTC

https://starlingbank.statuspage.io/incidents/cywzm6523wmm

meer53

Anthorn wrote: »

Starling Bank Mastercard debit card problem today and it hit me hard: Card declined in Iceland, Sainsbury's Bank ATM declined, Lloyds Bank ATM declined. The only place I've seen this problem reported is in the Starling Bank app and that report too has disappeared since I dismissed it.

Quite frankly if this problem is confined to Starling Bank I won't be with Starling next week because it will have reached the ranks of the unreliable. Hey, at this time even TSB looks to be more reliable than Starling Bank.

Well, that's my weekend away completely ruined!

EDIT:
Looks like the problem reported above is unique to Starling Bank. Bye-bye Starling Bank. Been great knowing you if only for a short time:

https://starlingbank.statuspage.io/incidents/cywzm6523wmm

Why would this cause you to leave them ? Bit of an overreaction surely ? This happens to all banks at some stage. Did you go away with only 1 card ?

unkle

Theres a lot of nice things about starling, and a lot thats not.

The cap on transfers and card payments makes it a no no for me. Very difficult to pay in cash or cheques,

The main part is the instant balance.e. debit card payments coming out immediately, outside of that I find them poor.

Anthorn

meer53 wrote: »

Why would this cause you to leave them ? Bit of an overreaction surely ? This happens to all banks at some stage. Did you go away with only 1 card ?

I have been very consistent in my response to bank failures: If a bank fails or if anyone is concerned about their bank failing or indeed doesn't trust their bank they should switch. Personally, I'm not really concerned about Starling going down because perhaps the loss of my weekend away was my own fault for leaving everything until the last minute. The biggest question is when is it going to fail again? There has been no response from Starling Bank other than scheduled maintenance on Sunday last. Perhaps Starling should have blamed it on Brexit or the ageing population ROFL.

To cut the above short, I don't trust Starling: They failed so they will fail again! c.f. TSB.

mrmajika

Anthorn wrote: »

To cut the above short, I don't trust Starling: They failed so they will fail again! c.f. TSB.

Agree, they probably will go down again at some juncture. The problem is that I don't know of a major bank who hasn't had such problems. A quick search of the news articles here shows all the big banking groups have had issues over the years.

To mitigate the risk it's best to have at least 2 cards out and about with you from different groups, preferably covering both the Visa network and MasterCard network.

Anthorn

mrmajika wrote: »

Agree, they probably will go down again at some juncture. The problem is that I don't know of a major bank who hasn't had such problems. A quick search of the news articles here shows all the big banking groups have had issues over the years.

To mitigate the risk it's best to have at least 2 cards out and about with you from different groups, preferably covering both the Visa network and MasterCard network.

Let's look back into the comparatively recent past when the new Fintech app-only banks were starting. The big selling point was that their systems and apps were built from the ground up whereas the existing banks had legacy systems which go down when they are changed. The inference there was that the new banks won't go down because their systems are new. We now know that wasn't then and is not now true.

The quoted post above illustrates quite graphically the state of British banking: Banks go down so we have to ensure that we have a back-up. But what happens when the back-up too goes down as happened with the recent MasterCard failure and before that the VISA failure. So therefore we need a back up to back-up our main account and in addition a back-up for the back-up and a back-up for that too and perhaps yet another back-up and so on!

Lastly it is not unreasonable to expected banks to stay up and equally not unreasonable to dump banks which do go down!

ValiantSon

Anthorn wrote: »

I have been very consistent in my response to bank failures: If a bank fails or if anyone is concerned about their bank failing or indeed doesn't trust their bank they should switch. Personally, I'm not really concerned about Starling going down because perhaps the loss of my weekend away was my own fault for leaving everything until the last minute. The biggest question is when is it going to fail again? There has been no response from Starling Bank other than scheduled maintenance on Sunday last. Perhaps Starling should have blamed it on Brexit or the ageing population ROFL.

To cut the above short, I don't trust Starling: They failed so they will fail again! c.f. TSB.

If you adopt this policy then you will quickly start running out of options. Banks suffer occasional technical issues.

EarthBoy

Anthorn wrote: »

Lastly it is not unreasonable to expected banks to stay up and equally not unreasonable to dump banks which do go down!

Where will you bank when you've dumped them all?