Starling now integrates with FreeAgent

[TheCyclingProgrammer]

You can't have multiple accounts with Starling. Other that one personal, one joint, one business. That's it.

You can have multiple business accounts. It’s in their FAQ.

[northernladuk]

Ah you’re right, damn.

Damn as in that's not good news or damn as in you've had to admit I'm right for once?

[TheCyclingProgrammer]

Damn as in that's not good news or damn as in you've had to admit I'm right for once?

Both.

[JRCT]

I thought you are only protected per person per bank so multiple accounts wouldn't add addition protection would it?

Technically, it's per banking licence, not bank. If a small bank operates under the licence of a larger group, then it's £85k across the lot.

[DesDixon]

Rather than starting an entirely new thread - does Starling allow you to custom schedule payments? E.g. one payment to accountany every quarter?

I've found with Tide that they only allow weekly or monthly and no customisation.

[Spoiler]

Rather than starting an entirely new thread - does Starling allow you to custom schedule payments? E.g. one payment to accountany every quarter?

I've found with Tide that they only allow weekly or monthly and no customisation.

Yes, looks like you can schedule payments 'Every' X Days/Weeks/Months/Years, i.e. Every 3 Months is an option.

[Paul WSS]

Tempted to transfer to Starling as part of the 'Business Banking Switch' offers from RBS, especially now that they have Freeagent enabled.

However looking at Trustpilot reviews, almost all of the negative ones seem to relate to people who have set up business accounts and then find them frozen for a significant period or even closed with no notice, as a result of Starling's fraud detection systems. Overall their satisfaction rating is reasonably good, but it is a concern that you could be locked out of your account, unable to pay bills or receive funds, with seemingly no means to have sensible conversations with someone to resolve it.

I'm in a real quandary as I like the idea of modern phone-based banking but don't like the idea that there is a risk of my banking being taken away and not being able to do anything about it promptly! I guess the answer might be to maintain a second business account elsewhere as a backup, but that does seem inconvenient.

Any thoughts or experiences welcome, although I appreciate that people who've not had any issues may have a totally different outlook to those that have.

Paul

[Maslins]

Any thoughts or experiences welcome, although I appreciate that people who've not had any issues may have a totally different outlook to those that have.

A client of ours had this issue with HSBC. Account frozen, no advanced warning, nothing. If you want to read more, he wrote a blog about it here.

Another client had a couple of fraudulent transactions go through his Barclays account. He reported them, got the money back, but seems someone Barclays end tagged his account suggesting he (company owner) was the one committing fraud, not the victim of fraud. A few years on he started a new business and is struggling to get a new bank account. After some digging, it's due to this.

I only mention these as it's not just "new"/"online" banks that this can happen with, it happens to huge high street banks too. Having said that, these thankfully seem to be freak occurrences rather than being common.

[Spoiler]

My experience so far with Starling's FA integration: it's not perfect.

First few transactions came across pretty much instantly.
Had a recent payment that went out of Starling and didn't show up in FA for ~14 hours.
This morning, two payments were made - one is showing in FA, the other one isn't (and it's the second one that was sent an hour after the first that is showing okay).
Expecting the missing transaction will show up in a few hours, in which case I'm trying not to be too pedantic about it - as if I was still doing it manually it wouldn't appear in FA for a few weeks

Previously contacted Starling support about this ... they said ask FA if there are any issues.
Asked FA support, they said it's nothing to do with them, it's Starling's own integration so ask Starling.

[TheCyclingProgrammer]

Not noticed any issues yet although I don't have a high number of transactions so not worried about small delays.

I did notice that FreeAgent was unable to auto-explain the transactions as it used to presumably because the metadata it uses to recognise transactions is tied to the previous bank account and formatting of the transaction name which is now different. I expect it will take a few months for that to settle down.