Starling Reviews

TLDR: If you’re applying to Starling based on what you’ve heard before, you might want to reconsider. It’s a different company under the new CEO, Raman Bhatia. Previous management valued and acted on employees’ opinions through the Peakon survey. Raman halted Peakon and is replacing Starling’s culture with some generic corporate bureaucracy and one-size-fits-all processes. His communication is mostly corporate jargon. The newly introduced performance management framework is confusing, even for line managers and the People Team. He hired an external company, Mindgym, that delivered some ridiculous corporate motivation quotes without a single piece of useful information. A new policy requiring a return to the office “effective immediately“ led to criticism of the CEO on Slack, which Raman blamed on employee misunderstandings in a series of panicky communications. If he can’t foresee people’s reactions on such a basic level, he’s not very good at his job. Starling won’t collapse overnight, but it’s likely to experience a gradual decline in innovation, quality, and customer satisfaction. The most talented people will leave, and the remaining ones will become frustrated and unmotivated. This is precisely what happened to Raman’s previous company, OVO.

Starling Bank displayed poor leadership and awful role modelling - C-suite leadership constantly harassed and micro-managed employees at all levels of the company which displayed no trust, effectively a vote of no confidence for one’s own employees. There was zero culture and this is important, especially considering it is a new FinTech, and young talent needs opportunity for development and career progression. Starling Bank does not provide that. There is a culture of fear- to drive more clicks and downloads, to the point where people can no longer effectively do their jobs. The leadership says it is open to opinions and contributions but will quickly put down any viewpoint that is contrary to its own. The biggest worry is with the CEO, who touts herself as a feminist banker. Instead of uplifting women as all her PR states, she denigrates and squashes women at all levels of the company who she finds threatening. Furthermore, she is obsessed with Monzo - there are days when it feels as if the company is run by Tom Blomfield - “what are they doing? How are they doing it?” It has reached levels of petty as if she has a grudge, which is the farthest thing from professional. Lastly, there is an issue of sexual harassment within the company. A minimum of five women have expressed feeling uncomfortable by advances of men within the company, but there are no reporting mechanisms in place.