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Starling makes money from business accounts (they pocket the interest on those, and that interest amounts to more considering business accounts keep a larger ba

Starling makes money from business accounts (they pocket the interest on those, and that interest amounts to more considering business accounts keep a larger balance) and I believe also provides services to other payment companies, essentially SaaS-ing their tech. It's a shame because this is something that Monzo could've done just as well and there's absolutely a place (well, was - that's now taken by Starling) in the market for it. Natwest still charges extra for a "next-gen" business account that allows multi-user access to a web UI, and I bet it's terrible - this is something a company can Monzo could've built in days based on their existing modern tech at a time where there was nothing like it in the market.

danpalmer 4y ago
Monzo do have good tech, but I've also heard that there is a "surprising amount of legacy tech" there as well. I'd interpret that as either they do too many re-writes of things, and/or they're perhaps not building at the level of quality that they should have been. They have some excellent engineers in the early team, but I've also seen a lot of very inexperienced people go there, so that in combination with a "move fast" mentality, will likely result in a lot of codebase issues and churn. Starling seem to have taken a "slow and steady wins the race" sort of approach, and had a bunch of experienced engineers build a boring old Java app. Nothing special but I'm not surprised that it is working out ok in the long run.
- raesene9 4y ago
  I've noticed that about Monzo. They were very early adopters of Kubernetes amongst other things, which surprised me as early Kubernetes was not exactly secure... Having seen some presentations about their tech. stack, it seems very clever and has interesting ideas, but I was worried that once the people who designed it had moved on , how maintainable would it be (coming from a banking background where I found that systems lived on for EVAR)
- nicoburns 4y ago
  Monzo seems to have gone all-in on microservices (they have thousands apparently), which sounds like an absolute nightmare.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    Yes that is one of my concerns with their tech stack. The management overhead of that must be insane.
  - andrewingram 4y ago
    One of their earliest engineers was apparently a bit of a microservices guru, so there's a good chance that at least they did it well, in terms of mitigating the litany of common issues. Though I'm still skeptical as to whether it was actually a good idea.
dbbk 4y ago
Monzo does have business accounts... I have one. It's great.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  They have them now, long after Starling ate their lunch - my point was that they could've offered them before Starling and probably made a killing (it would've been the only option for a modern business bank account in the market back in those days).

danpalmer 4y ago

Monzo do have good tech, but I've also heard that there is a "surprising amount of legacy tech" there as well. I'd interpret that as either they do too many re-writes of things, and/or they're perhaps not building at the level of quality that they should have been. They have some excellent engineers in the early team, but I've also seen a lot of very inexperienced people go there, so that in combination with a "move fast" mentality, will likely result in a lot of codebase issues and churn. Starling seem to have taken a "slow and steady wins the race" sort of approach, and had a bunch of experienced engineers build a boring old Java app. Nothing special but I'm not surprised that it is working out ok in the long run.

raesene9 4y ago
I've noticed that about Monzo. They were very early adopters of Kubernetes amongst other things, which surprised me as early Kubernetes was not exactly secure... Having seen some presentations about their tech. stack, it seems very clever and has interesting ideas, but I was worried that once the people who designed it had moved on , how maintainable would it be (coming from a banking background where I found that systems lived on for EVAR)
nicoburns 4y ago
Monzo seems to have gone all-in on microservices (they have thousands apparently), which sounds like an absolute nightmare.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Yes that is one of my concerns with their tech stack. The management overhead of that must be insane.
- andrewingram 4y ago
  One of their earliest engineers was apparently a bit of a microservices guru, so there's a good chance that at least they did it well, in terms of mitigating the litany of common issues. Though I'm still skeptical as to whether it was actually a good idea.

dbbk 4y ago

Monzo does have business accounts... I have one. It's great.

Nextgrid 4y ago
They have them now, long after Starling ate their lunch - my point was that they could've offered them before Starling and probably made a killing (it would've been the only option for a modern business bank account in the market back in those days).