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Starling Bank has launched a push to sell its software to US lenders as it tries to capitalise on their outdated technology and boost its international growth.
The London-based fintech has called in advisers from Deloitte and PwC to find US clients for its Engine software, which allows lenders to design and build their own digital banking capabilities.
“The big focus this year is North America, focused on the US,” said Sam Everington, chief executive of Engine, in an interview. “The banks haven’t had the same pressure to transform their systems [which] are very static. But that is changing.”
“There’s a lot of consolidation going on in the small end of the regional banking markets. So we think the time is right,” he added.
Everington said the fintech expects to sign a banking client in the “$5bn-50bn asset range” by early next year and has been meeting with lenders in the US.
The company plans to sell its services to multiple mid-tier banks and credit unions in North America in the future. Everington declined to name the banks Starling had spoken to.
Engine currently has three banking clients in Canada, Romania and Australia.
Starling set up Engine as a separate division from its consumer bank in 2022. The software business is a key part of its overseas expansion plans.
Starling has nearly 5mn customers, mostly in the UK. It has struggled to scale its consumer bank abroad and pulled out of an attempt to secure a European banking licence in 2022.
Raman Bhatia, the group’s chief executive, said in December that expanding a software business internationally could be cheaper and easier than growing a regulated consumer bank overseas.
“Engine is asset light, outside of a regulatory perimeter and provides at a group level a lot of resilience to the business model and amazing fee income,” he said.
Engine has set itself a target of reaching £100mn of annual recurring revenue, which Everington said it was “well on track” to hit “fairly quickly”. Engine reported £3.4mn of ARR and a pre-tax loss of £12.1mn in the 12 months to March 2025. The business accounted for only a fraction of Starling’s £714mn in group revenues for the year.
Everington said the US market was ripe for disruption because American banks have historically relied on a handful of established software providers.
“The market is absolutely dominated by incumbent system providers that I think between them have over 90 per cent of the market,” he said.
“They’ve not seen fintech revolution, they’re still barely turning on real-time payments — they’ve got all sorts of workaround solutions like Cash App and Venmo.”
Starling hopes to win market share from established financial software providers such as Jack Henry, Finastra, Fiserv, Temonos, CSI and Fidelity National Information Services (FIS).
Last year, Engine established a Delaware subsidiary and appointed Jody Bhagat, a former McKinsey partner, as its US president to oversee a $50mn expansion of its New York office where it plans to have 20-25 staff.
Starling’s push comes as other British fintechs, faced with slowing domestic consumer growth, set their sights on the US for expansion.
Starling Bank was founded in 2014 by former Allied Irish Banks executive Anne Boden, and is one of a crop of fintechs, such as Revolut and Monzo, hoping to disrupt the big four UK lenders: HSBC, NatWest, Lloyds and Barclays.
Despite sleek apps, relatively few consumers use the neobanks for their primary account into which their wages are paid.
Starling chief financial officer, Declan Ferguson, previously told the FT that it was interested in buying a US bank to secure an American licence and plugging Engine into the combined lender to prove its value in the hope others would start using the software.