The UK fintech unicorn Starling Bank had a great 2021. In a blog post, the company’s CEO Anne Boden shared the bank’s milestones. The bank finished last year with more than 2.7 million accounts, including 475,000 business accounts for small and medium-sized enterprises. Starling Bank‘s UK SME market share now tops seven percent, almost half of Barclays’ share.
The fintech’s deposit base now stands at £8.4 billion, up from £4.8 billion in 2020. The lending increased from £1.9 billion to £3.1 billion.
Key milestones in 2021 included the of Fleet Mortgages, a specialist buy-to-let lender that started in 2014 with the aim of running a business its employees could be “proud to work for.” Starling Bank raised a further £322 million from some of the world’s biggest financial heavyweights. Among them is Goldman Sachs. And the fintech launched a host of new features including the Kite app for children aged 6 to 16, the first full generation of digital finance natives.
As a profitable, fast-growing fintech built on proprietary software and with a substantial loan book, a valuation in excess of £1 billion, and a tightly controlled cost-base, Starling Bank now stands in a category of one, Anne Boden rightfully boasts in her blog post.
