UK neobank Starling plans to go public within two years

Starling Bank, one of the U.K.’s biggest challenger banks with millions of customers, is on a trajectory to go public in one or two years, CEO Anne Boden said.

Why should we care?
Starling, which was founded in 2014, first offered fee-free consumer checking accounts through a linked app and later expanded to lending and business banking, product additions that helped the company break even for the first time in October 2020. By the end of June of 2021, £3.9B ($5.3B) of Starling’s deposits were from businesses while £2.8B ($3.8B) billion were from retail users. Starling, which was last privately valued at $1.5B, generated £97.6 million ($133.2 million) in 2019. Boden, who last year vowed that the firm wasn’t going to sell to the “big boys” (large banks), wrote in a soon-to-launch book that she always checked Starling’s progress alongside Monzo, a U.K. competitor neobank that was established around the same time. “The extraordinary experiences of the year 2020 made it clearer than ever that our competitors are now Lloyds, Barclays et al.,” wrote Boden. The company said the IPO would most likely take place in London.