Case Study: Starling Bank achieves rapid, secure, and compliant mobile‑first banking with Amazon Web Services

How Starling Bank is disrupting the banking industry

Starling Bank is a mobile‑first challenger founded to “do one thing really well” — deliver the best current account service — in a post‑2008 environment where customers and regulators demanded faster, more transparent and customer‑centric banking. Its founders faced five core challenges: scaling to millions of customers, keeping data and transactions secure, enabling rapid innovation, controlling costs, and meeting strict financial regulation.

Starling solved those challenges by building a fully cloud‑based, UK‑licensed banking platform on AWS (using EC2, RDS, S3 and Lambda) with automated, auditable operations and privileged access controls. The result is a disruptive, compliance‑approved bank that offers minutes‑long account setup, faster payments, spending insights, adjustable overdrafts, mobile wallet support, international protections and growing integrations (Alexa, Moneybox, TransferWise), enabling rapid product innovation and customer growth.

Starling Bank

Anne Boden

CEO