Starling Bank
Starling Bank is a UK app-only digital challenger bank founded in 2014 by Anne Boden and headquartered in London, holding a full UK banking licence and authorised and regulated by the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority (FSCS-protected, SWIFT SRLGGB2L). It is a privately held company - not a mutual and not publicly listed - backed by investors including Goldman Sachs, Fidelity, and the Qatar Investment Authority, and it also licenses its core banking platform as Software-as-a-Service under the "Engine by Starling" brand. As an FCA-authorised ASPSP it participates in UK Open Banking / PSD2, but Starling is best known for its own developer-friendly, bespoke RESTful Developer API (accounts, transaction feed, payments, payees, savings goals/spaces, cards, mandates, and identity) served over OAuth2 at api.starlingbank.com with a full sandbox, alongside its Open Banking Read/Write (AIS, PIS, CBPII) conformance to the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) standard secured with FAPI-grade OAuth2/OIDC, mutual-TLS, and PSD2 strong customer authentication. Starling is a challenger bank and is not one of the nine CMA9 mandated banks.
Real signal across most facets with visible, nameable gaps — the contract exists but is thin, or the portal is good while governance and commercial terms are absent.
API Evangelist profiles Starling Bank the way a machine reads it — 16 machine-readable artifacts across 13 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.
Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — Starling Bank scores 47.7/100 (developing), with a separate agent-readiness read of 50/100 (agent ready). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.
Kin Score
This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.
Kin Score
How this is scored →scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
How we profile Starling Bank
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Starling Bank. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.
APIs 13
Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
Starling Accounts API
Bespoke Starling Developer API for retrieving a customer's accounts, account identifiers (sort code / account number), and balances. Served over OAuth2 at the api.starlingbank.c...
Starling Account Holder API
Returns account-holder profile information - the type of account holder (individual, business, joint, sole trader), name, and registered details - from the Starling bespoke Deve...
Starling Transaction Feed API
The Starling transaction feed (feed items) API exposes real-time transaction activity, feed-item detail, spending categories, receipts, and attachments for an account over the b...
Starling Payments API
Initiate and manage domestic and scheduled payments, payment orders, and standing orders from a Starling account through the bespoke Developer API, secured with OAuth2 and payme...
Starling Payees API
Create, list, and manage payees (beneficiaries) and payee accounts used when initiating payments from a Starling account via the bespoke Developer API.
Starling Savings Goals API
Create and manage Savings Goals (Spaces), add or withdraw money, and round-up transfers within a Starling account through the bespoke Developer API.
Starling Cards API
Retrieve card details and control card settings - enabling or disabling the card and per-feature controls (ATM, online, mobile wallet, magstripe, gambling) - via the Starling be...
Starling Mandates API
List and cancel direct debit mandates on a Starling account through the bespoke Developer API.
Starling Identity API
Returns the identity and token/authorising-individual context for the authenticated Starling user, including the scopes granted to the access token, via the bespoke Developer API.
Starling Open Data API (OBIE Standard)
UK Open Banking Open Data API - PUBLIC, unauthenticated reference data (personal and business current accounts, and, for banks with a physical estate, ATMs and branches) modelle...
Starling Account and Transaction Information API (AIS, OBIE Read/Write)
UK Open Banking Read/Write Account and Transaction Information (AIS) API for accessing account, balance, transaction, and product data as an FCA-authorised ASPSP, conformant to ...
Starling Payment Initiation API (PIS, OBIE Read/Write)
UK Open Banking Read/Write Payment Initiation (PIS) API for initiating domestic and other payments as an FCA-authorised ASPSP, conformant to the OBIE Read/Write standard and sec...
Starling Confirmation of Funds API (CBPII, OBIE Read/Write)
UK Open Banking Read/Write Confirmation of Funds (CBPII) API allowing a card-based payment instrument issuer to confirm whether funds are available, as an FCA-authorised ASPSP, ...
Scroll within the panel for all 13 ·
Security Posture 3
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Resources
Every other property we hold for Starling Bank — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.
Get Started 3
Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call
Documentation 2
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Agent Surfaces 2
MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs
Design & Contract 5
Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events
Build 3
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Access & Security 6
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Operate 2
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Commercial 2
Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use
Company 3
The organization behind the API
Other 2
Properties that don't map to a standard resource type
← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/starling-bank · machine-readable index on apis.io