I’m completely baffled by their decision.
Who are these people they apparently did customer research with? Certainly wasn’t me.
You can already get 1 year fixed above starlings rate, and that was before the BoE announced the 3.5% base rate.
Their offering was already not competitive on release, and now it’s going to be even less competitive with the rate rise.
No idea what they were thinking… get the people who don’t know any better ?
Well, to be fair, that probably counts for a large proportion of their customer base!
It’s not even competitive compared with high street banks…
To be fair, I’d doubt that Starling has a majority of clueless people as customers. Those are the kind who just use Lloyds because their parents setup their account for them.
I didn’t quite say that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a significant number are happy just to accept what pops up in the app. A couple of family members have just gone with a savings account that their current account provider offers simply because they hate looking around for better interest.
Curious. Nationwide are currently offering 4% on a one-year fix, no minimum deposit. Interesting that Starling launched this a day after the base rate was increased to 3.5% too. All things considered, it’s not a good offering.
Interesting! I really hope this all points to them changing this
And Zopa 95-day has just gone up to 3.26%. And likely to rise again
Just set up a new Virtual card, and a few things of note:
Daily spending limit is only £500, so they clearly don’t want you using one instead of your main physical card.
You can only create 5 cards each week (and a total of 5 active cards at once). So you can’t constantly be deleting and creating a card to just get a new card number.
The expiry date for a virtual card is 2032! This in itself is a good reason to use it for your subscriptions, as then you’re only going to have to go through the hassle of updating the card details on all your subscriptions every 10 years.
Ha! When did this arrive? Clearly I’ve not been paying attention 
Within 10 years I expect we’ll be past expiring cards (or there will be some auto update functionality on the Mastercard/visa end)
I sure hope so!
So
Just managed to create 2 virtual Starling cards, but only after updating the app (which it was outlined above wasn’t necessary). I tried before updating the app (nothing visible) and then again after updating 10 minutes later, so it could have been a coincidence, but I doubt it.
The virtual cards seem only available in the sterling account - most of my money on Starling is on the Euro account, and there’s no possibility to create a virtual card (although there is a possibility to create a “space”).
In the sterling part of the account, I have 3 “spaces” one of which has an attached additional physical card. I was (unsurprisingly) unable to create a virtual card there. The other 2 I was able to, but - get this - trying to add the virtual card to Google Pay - which it offers, results in an error reading “An error has occurred when setting up Google Wallet. Please try again later (6)”. So no Google Wallet for the account, which is mildly irritating, and surely the point of virtual cards?
I don’t know if it’s because there’s no money in them presently?
EDIT: No, added money, still didn’t work. Could be something Google Pay related instead
Are you trying to enable contactless payments through it?
I forgot to say I got the virtual cards the other day, no app update required.
Likewise.
I checked at 2345 yesterday and I didn’t have Virtual Cards. I did an update and then got them immediately after.
I feel like iOS/Android is pretty important to mention here. iOS is a lot more strict about what you can push in a non-app update iirc
You could be right… I’m on Android.
