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Sam Everington – Engine by Starling: Why banks are renting Starling’s core.

July 28, 2026 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

In 2016, Sam Everington joined Starling Bank as one of its first twenty employees. Starling did not have a banking licence yet. It had no product, no brand, and no customers. What it had was a room full of engineers who believed a bank could be built from the customer support desk backwards, rather than from a requirements document forwards.

Ten years and one banking licence later, Starling Bank has 4.5 million UK customers, half a million business accounts, and a 9% share of UK business banking. I met Sam and his colleague Mark Bernhardi, who runs Engine’s Australia and New Zealand business, at the World Credit Union Conference in Sydney. What they described wasn’t a fintech growth story. It was an answer to a question most bank boards are quietly avoiding: can you fix a core banking problem without a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars.

Engine by Starling: the neobank that became a core banking vendor

The easy version of this story is that Starling did well, and one of its early engineers is now senior. That’s true, and it’s the least interesting part of it.

Four years ago, Starling split its technology into a separate company, Engine by Starling, and started selling the core banking platform it built for itself to other banks. AMP Bank went live on Engine in under twelve months. SBS Bank in New Zealand signed a ten-year deal with Engine in February, its first mutual client. Salt Bank in Romania and Tangerine in Canada run on the same platform. That is not a digital bank licensing its brand. That is a neobank turning its core technology into a product category.

Why the neobank speed problem was always a core banking problem

Originally it was thought the neobank threat to incumbents was about interfaces: better apps, friendlier onboarding, cheaper fees. That was Fintech 1.0, the low hanging fuit. The real cost incumbents carried sat underneath, in core banking systems nobody outside a technology division ever sees, and in the capital required to replace them.

Sam puts the figure at hundreds of millions of pounds to build what Engine now licenses. Mark Bernhardi, who spent years selling core banking transformation at nCino, described the mechanism plainly: every bank on Engine runs the same software Starling runs, updated 40 to 60 times a day. A mutual bank in New Zealand and a digital bank in Romania are, in a real sense, running the same bank.

The commercial model is just as important as the technology. Engine is sold as a managed service rather than a licensed stack a bank has to run itself, which means the heaviest capital outlay only arrives once the platform is delivering usage, not before a single customer has signed up. That is a different risk profile to the traditional core banking RFP, where the cheque is written years before any benefit shows up, and it is the detail that gets a business case past a CEO who has already been burned by one transformation program.

A decade of watching core banking eat bank strategy

This is where my own decade in fintech recruitment lines up with theirs. I’ve watched two waves in Australian banking since 2016. The first was the restricted authorised deposit-taking institution licence wave of 2018 and 2019, when a run of digital challengers launched believing they could compete with the Big Four who have 85% market share. Almost none of them survive as standalone brands today.

The second wave, the one underway now, is quieter and involves no new logos at all. It is existing institutions, mostly mutuals and second-tier banks, buying the core banking technology stack a neobank would have built, rather than the neobank itself.

The first wave mostly failed for the reason Sam gave for Engine’s existence: the big four were never going to lose on technology, because the profits that followed the GFC let them keep reinvesting in it while smaller players tried to catch up. A new licence without a distribution advantage or a technology advantage is just a smaller, less capitalised version of an incumbent. What changes the equation for a mutual bank or a credit union isn’t a new licence. It’s access to a core banking platform someone else already spent a decade paying for, priced as a service rather than a build.

SBS Bank is a member-owned mutual whose balance sheet wouldn’t stretch to a fraction of what a major bank spends on technology in a single year. If Engine’s model works there, the constraint that has kept Australia and New Zealand’s smaller customer-owned banks running on ageing cores is no longer there.

The obvious objection is risk: touching the core has long been the accepted career killer for a banking CEO, because the value of a core migration typically lands in year four or five, well past the tenure of the executive who approved it and took on all the downside. Engine’s answer is to compress that timeline, moving the growth benefit into year one and the full payback into year three, which is a genuinely different risk profile for a board to sign off on, including under stress testing.

What Engine by Starling means for digital banks in Australia and New Zealand

The next decade will be won by whoever can absorb change fastest without breaking governance, and that capability is now something a bank can buy off the shelf rather than something it has to build over a decade the way Starling did.

There is already a second order effect visible in the market, and it has nothing to do with cost. Bank leadership teams that get a modern core banking platform live quickly start talking about product with more conviction, not because pricing changed, but because they can finally ship something differentiated instead of a marginally cheaper version of the same term deposit. That shift in ambition, from defending margin to building product, is arguably a bigger prize for a bank’s board than the capex saving, because it changes what the executive team believes is possible to build in the first place.

For Australia and New Zealand’s customer owned banking sector specifically, that’s a genuine opportunity to compete for customers. A mutual bank was never going to out invest CBA on technology. What it can do is leverage the same technology platform that has the major banks worried.

The talent question Engine by Starling raises for every bank board

Ten years ago, Sam Everington sat in a room with nineteen other people and no banking licence, building the systems that would eventually serve 4.5 million customers. What he described in Sydney wasn’t the end of that story. It was that same build, packaged, priced, and now available to any bank willing to buy speed instead of spending a decade building it.

Buying the platform is the easy half of this decision. The harder half is who runs it once it lands. A core banking migration compressed from five years into one still needs an operator who has built and shipped inside exactly that kind of ambiguity, not a career banker who has only ever managed a core that was already stable. That’s a different hire than the one most banks have on their bench today.

Racing to fix a legacy core and need the operator who can lead it? Talk to us about your search.

Links from this episode.

Engine by Starling on Fintech Chatter.

More on customer-owned banking.

Full transcript.

Lightly edited for readability — filler words removed, wording otherwise unchanged.

Dexter Cousins
Fintech Chatter: the conversations fintech leaders actually listen to, presented by Tier One People, executive search for fintech.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Fintech Chatter. I’m Dexter Cousins, your host and the founder of Tier One People, the executive search firm that for the past decade has been helping businesses like today’s guests identify that 1% who redefine what’s possible. Today’s guests are Sam Everington and Mark Bernhardi of Engine by Starling. Guys, welcome, and thank you for hosting me at the World Credit Union Conference.

Sam Everington
Thank you. It’s great.

Mark Bernhardi
Great to be morning, sir. Good for you.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, what a backdrop. Arian couldn’t have branded this better.

Sam Everington
First ever conference started as well.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome. Well, look, it’s great to be doing this with you at the event. Sam, maybe if you tell us a little bit about yourself and Engine by Starling.

Sam Everington
Yeah, so career software developer, but I joined Starling 10 years ago now, back as a 20-person startup, pre-bank and banking licence, to build out the product and technology that eventually let Starling launch in 2017 and have the impact it’s had on customers. Now 4.5 million customers in the UK, half a million businesses and 9% market share in business banking, which is an incredible land grab effectively from the incumbents in that time.

So that is the genesis of Engine and the business that we evolved. And then for the last four years we separated Engine, the technology company, out into a separate business, and have been using that as the vehicle to partner with established banks in other markets to bring Starling’s product and technology know-how and the systems we built to enable these outcomes for customers, and bring that in partnership with the things that are hard to scale yourself: the brand, the licence, the trust, the credit risk and market knowledge and understanding. And together we think we can have a much bigger impact much more quickly.

Dexter Cousins
And Mark, what’s your role at Engine?

Mark Bernhardi
Well, Sam brought me on to lead our growth in Australia and New Zealand. I first came across the Engine brand when AMP announced to go live, and I was really impressed. To get a bank live in 12 months was something that’s going to get your attention. And then quickly after that Engine announced their partnership with SBS Bank. I’d really drawn to the speed at which Engine was delivering change, and also getting to those outcomes, and I think you and I so many more stories, especially when it comes to core migration.

So the ability to get AMP live within 12 months, start that partnership and collaboration with SBS Bank, that was something I thought was really interesting and got me looking into it and wanting to learn more. And now I’m part of the team and looking forward to getting some more partnerships in our region and growing the business.

Dexter Cousins
Well, we’re going to talk a little bit more about that in a moment. But Sam, super interested in your backstory, because you started out building the tech for Starling. Do you want to talk us through that journey that you’ve been on in the neobanking space, and what it was like to be that early in one of the most successful neobanks on the planet?

Sam Everington
Yeah, there’s a real buzz around fintech in the UK at the time. Who I worked for a software vendor before my career. Started as a mainframe developer, spent my life replacing leasing and lending systems in banks and wheelchair manufacturers. So mostly gnarly, big transformation programs. And Starling was a real opportunity to start from scratch, as somebody would look it, but really to build inside the business that was going to use it, rather than the other side of RFP processes and requirements documents and change requests and that kind of thing.

And that’s the difference to me. We were sat in one building effectively with the bankers, with the product owners, with the operations teams, from frontline customer support to card ops, payments ops, financial crime teams, deeply embedded with engineering in a way that you could never do in any normal commercial relationship. And so every day we’d get feedback from customers, feedback from staff, and we could act on it, iterate, give something a try, see how it works, adjust it, because the first version of anything you design is imperfect. Inevitably you don’t know what you want, and the users fundamentally don’t know what they want either. And we could really shorten that feedback loop and quickly adjust, work out what matters, what didn’t matter, and bring that to life as quickly as possible.

Both, yes, for the benefit of customers, but actually the biggest difference is the benefit of the employees. And that’s what so many companies fail to appreciate: if you build the right systems and support your employees to enjoy their jobs and be good at their jobs, they then go on to give better service, to deliver better outcomes for customers. And that really comes through in the experience of Starling’s customers in the world around and the position we’ve managed to achieve in the market.

Dexter Cousins
What was it like being able to build, though, with minimal resources as a startup?

Sam Everington
Yeah. We’re going to talk about this a little bit later, but the technology still wasn’t quite there to build on the vision. It was tough. We had quite an experienced team. We all came out of financial technology companies and that kind of thing, so we had a better idea than a lot of fintechs what it was going to take to get this done, but no appreciation for the sheer scope of systems you needed to build and develop to really run a full-service checking, savings, lending operation as an organisation. Had we known what we were taking on, I’m not sure we would have embarked on that journey at all.

And you see that in the market now, with a few vendors trying to build things that look a bit like Engine, and the capital expense, the burn necessary to get there, and big banks, tier ones, still going down the path of trying to build it all themselves. And the budgets that they’re writing to do that are astronomical. They say it’s a big undertaking. Banks are complex organisations and a lot of technology’s needed.

Dexter Cousins
So Mark, you’ve got a really varied background at Atlassian and nCino. Now you’re at Engine by Starling. What has that given you in terms of an understanding as to the challenges that we’ve got here specifically in Australia, especially when it comes to core banking technology?

Mark Bernhardi
Yeah, I spent my career before that in banking, so I’d actually been on the transformation side as well, trying to ingest a lot of this technology. And as I traversed into Atlassian and nCino, and now with Engine, I’ve really grown an appreciation for what’s continued to draw me: the speed at which we’re able to make those travel leaders. But I think more importantly with Engine, we have bankers within the organisation that have a first-hand appreciation for the risk and compliance environment in which we need to build. But banks are not immune to change. We still have to help our banks take on that change. And so that ability to bring risk and compliance into how we deliver that change, I think, is fundamentally what makes us different to some of the other generic software providers out there.

But it’s exciting. I think the market is uniquely primed at the moment for the smaller community banks to tap into that technology. And I really like the way that Sam described it. I think what’s unique is where Engine came from within Starling Bank: the software was built for a specific purpose. Starling didn’t go to market and bring a software in and say, well, how do we now define our operations to align with the software? They said, let’s build that operational model, that customer-centric model, and then make the software fit around that. And I think that’s the proposition we’re bringing to our market today.

Dexter Cousins
One of the challenges I think has always been here in the mutual space and credit unions. I look at some of my clients who are mutual banks or customer-owned banks, and the assets that they’ve got on the balance sheet wouldn’t even equate to the annual technology spend of a CBA. How have you built something that not only can you implement within 12 months, but that these types of businesses can actually afford to use and to implement?

Mark Bernhardi
Well, I think the budget of CBA probably bors our own market capitalisation, the spend that community banks have access to.

Look, I think the principles on which cloud software has now been built are very much usage-based: making sure that it’s open through APIs, it’s modular, that consumers and community banks can actually adapt to it quickly. That’s the key difference I’m seeing with modern capability versus the legacy software. Legacy software was built very much as a closed ecosystem, to basically have all their services tacked into it. Modern technology is built as an open ecosystem, one where banks can access the data, they own the data, but they can also bring some of their other partnerships into the ecosystem to plug some of those capabilities and provide a full end-to-end experience for their customers.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And what have you found with that, Sam, from a fintech community perspective? I remember being here in 2018 when Sibos was here, and one of the things that really struck me was with APIs, it was almost like we could have a Stone & Chalk, which is our fintech hub, but in the cloud. We’ve not quite got to that point. The promise of CDR and open banking hasn’t quite got the traction here in Oz that we hoped it would. So what are you seeing from a partnerships perspective, and this ecosystem of different solutions that you can bring in for your customers? Is that something that you’ve been able to do with Engine?

Sam Everington
Yeah, there’s two different perspectives on it. There’s the consulting plan of the last five or 10 years of composable banking, where you bring 30 different best-of-breed vendors together, and that’s been the model that’s pitched to banks of the future. And the reality for those that have gone down that path is the integration effort is just too complex and too capital intensive, to your budget question. I’d say tens of hundreds of millions of dollars of program just to integrate the components to get to a basic foundation of a savings product, let alone a checking product, a richer lending product.

And so you don’t need to choose that many different vendors in an ecosystem. It’s not an efficient way to deliver most of it. You just need something that works, and then you hero the few things that are your differentiator as an organisation. 90% of all banks are the same product, same servicing, the same P&L. The 10, 20% around the edge is where the differentiation comes, and you need a technology system that’s flexible enough to enable those differentiators easily. Everything in APIs and events, in the world we’re moving to, so you can plug in those ecosystem partners and deliver real value and a real differentiation for customers.

But not to an extent where you have to make choices on five different payment gateways, different CRM, different fin crime and case management tools, down to who handles the telefan lines and that kind of thing. You could do that, but there’s no need to manage it to that extent. And that’s where Engine helps, because we’ve got a good answer out of the box for each of those. Starling’s optimised the journeys, optimised the employee experience over years. And that’s fundamentally how we can do it in under 12 months. We are turning on a running bank, from all the back-end systems to the employee interface, to the SDKs, to the customer journeys that enable that. And so the year’s implementation program isn’t technology wiring up systems and basic testing. It’s a year of differentiating proposition work and a few key integrations that hero those differences.

Dexter Cousins
So we’ve all heard the term that touching the core is the career killer of a banking CEO.

Sam Everington
The job best left.

Dexter Cousins
Exactly. We talked about the cost implications and challenges, but how have you overcome the push against the risk element of touching technology?

Sam Everington
Yeah. Everyone goes into businesses wanting to make a difference, wanting to make an impact, but they don’t want to do it at the expense of their own track record, their own reputation, ultimately. And the problem with big core programs is when you’re writing a business case and the value comes in year four, year five, that’s the tenure of an average executive. And so you’re writing a business case where you take all of the risk and your successor gets all of the upside. And that’s pretty difficult to contemplate and sign off.

And so what we’ve really focused on is getting the growth, the value, into the business case much, much quicker than that. If you can get the business growing in a new customer segment, expanding in market, in under 12 months or something first, and then deliver the meaningful transformation, the meaningful decommissioning, the cost out, effectively removing the complexity in the couple of years after that, your full business case is delivered by year three, but there’s growth coming in offsetting the costs within a year. And on top of all of that, the upfront capex is much, much, much lower if you’re buying this as a pre-built managed service in the SaaS model. The cost, the usage, only arrives when it delivers. And so your upfront investment risk is much lower.

And that’s the difference. You can experiment with this effectively. There’s a fairly low-cost way to get it implemented, demonstrate the growth there, demonstrate the system works locally in the market. And there’s countless examples of years-long programs that don’t deliver that. And then once you’ve proven the system’s working in the market, you deliver the migrations in quite quick succession afterwards. It really changes the timescales of it, as well as the upfront economics, and that’s suddenly a thing you can contemplate signing off yourself. But also that you can take your board on: even when you run stress scenarios on it and it becomes a year four, year five payback in stress scenarios, that’s still a comprehensible risk and a budget that you could sign off.

Dexter Cousins
One of the second-order benefits that I’ve noticed from this far more rapid deployment of the technology is there’s now a lot more conviction that I’m seeing with banking CEOs around actual product development. Hey, we actually now can do some things that are different, not the same old product that’s existed, slightly faster, slightly cheaper. Are you seeing a similar thing? I think AMP is probably a good example, where Sean, when he was on the show, was talking about doing things, and I was, wow, right. It’s encouraging to hear a banking CEO talk about new products that actually seem relevant to me in my life.

Sam Everington
The big shift to me is that it’s not just talking about products. Products in bank land: new term deposits, new rates for things, new pricing on loans, that kind of thing in the traditional sense. The product here is tools and solutions that solve problems for customers. That’s the real shift in mindset in the last few years. Actually, a lot of what banks do are services to people, to families, to business owners, and the products in that sense are systems, technology, that make their lives easier, that help them better understand their money, manage their money, get paid and make payments, and that kind of thing. And that’s the shift that I’m really interested in.

But also I think we’ve played a big part in making… actually, the business case isn’t a crude financial business case of what’s the revenue uplift on this or the cost out. This is actually: what can it do for customers? Because if you do something good for customers, that delivers growth, that lowers acquisition costs. It builds up the brand and the trust and the position in the market, and that delivers a real upside for the bank beyond the traditional way of looking at products, which is just pricing, cost of capital, cost of risk.

Mark Bernhardi
I think what’s also unique is that we’re a managed service, we’re used by Starling Bank, and all of our customers use exactly the same software that’s in the market. If you combine that with the fact that Engine is making 40 to 60 releases per day, at the speed of change, you’re not waiting for some sort of release documentation or to write business requirements. You’re actually seeing working software, and you’re seeing how other customers are adapting that software. You could be talking to Salt Bank in Romania or Tangerine in Canada or Starling Bank in the UK, and looking at how they are innovating with the same feature set that you’re getting, and then starting to take some inspiration from that and saying, I actually think that would be great for my customer, and feeding into that ecosystem. You’re innovating in real time with working software at pace. You’re not waiting to deliberate on a feature for 12 to 18 months. You can see this thing come to life really quickly, in a matter of weeks.

Dexter Cousins
We haven’t mentioned the AI, and we’re 30 minutes in, right? Congratulations. But obviously it’s having a huge impact, and it’s on almost every stand. We’ve been around long enough to know all the buzzwords and the hype and the hype cycles. This for me isn’t a hype cycle. I think we’re very much at the beginning of a way bigger change than I witnessed when I first came into recruitment, which was everybody all of a sudden getting a computer on their desk and access to the internet. This is now multiples of that. What are you finding from your customers as to what their expectations are? Is there still a lot of hesitancy around adopting the technology?

Sam Everington
We’ve all seen the shift in our personal lives. People have adopted it incredibly quickly, and the technology’s come on leaps and bounds in that respect. There’s two challenges for banks, actually. The biggest one is generally getting the data into the models. The fundamental knowledge processing isn’t there, but these things are effective because of context. And if you’re at a traditional back office with 7, 10, 20 different systems that people are swivel-chairing between, the context is split. It’s disparate. You cannot get it to a model. The human is aggregating it from different screens. The agent can’t do that effectively. And so unless you can get the full context into the model, the agents, the dream of a back office in a bank can’t be realised.

And that’s really encouraging technology modernisation at a pace we’ve not seen before, because if your system can’t produce events and can’t extract data in real time, and can’t do that across a broad range of topics, from the customer’s free-text contact history and call logs, through to internal complaints and financial crime and case management tools, through to the actual banking transactional repayment history data, the models won’t produce useful outputs for customers or for staff, because they just won’t know what’s going on. So it’s driving a big challenge for technology teams, effectively, of how do we accelerate modernisation to be able to make use of those.

The real challenge for banks is the governance and control journey, and getting used to managing this kind of change. So our first use case was internal, human in the loop: transcribing calls, writing the call transcription, summarising it into action points, getting a human to review that. It saves time. Nice clear use case, but if the model makes a mistake, there’s no risk of harm. The human managed the interaction.

Getting it to customer-facing propositions took a lot more thought around the guardrails, financial advice, looking after people, that kind of thing. So the first use cases were… there’s a thing called Scam Intelligence. You take a photo of a thing you’re intending to make a payment for, be it a WhatsApp message from a family member asking for money, through to buying a PlayStation that looks too good to be true on Facebook Marketplace or something like that. And the AI will tell you whether there’s risks that you’re making it pay for for reason. But the human input was just an image. The prompt came from us. And so we knew it couldn’t go off-piste, and our compliance and control team was comfortable with that.

That then evolved to Spending Intelligence, starting to ask questions about your spending. It’s now human, customer-entered prompts, but the data it has to process and the guardrails can be incredibly tight. It won’t care about anything else in the world. And we eventually got through to a full generic assistant that can take action on your bank account, as we got more comfortable with the guardrails and loosened them and loosened them.

But even there, it’s designed to exit the AI at key moments. So the AI decides it wants to take an action on your behalf. We capture it at that point, exit the AI state, and then it goes through some human-authored, compliance-reviewed copy that explains in plain English what it’s about to do. That gives us a moment to check that we think that’s appropriate, given everything we know about that relationship. The human can then consent to that action, and then we give the AI the freedom to go and make the API calls. The agent can go and carry out that action.

This has been a very careful design journey to get the governance and the control environment right, because the ways banks are used to working don’t mind in the AI age. You have a contract with us that says we’ll give you six to 12 months’ deprecation notice when something changes or needs to be removed. The AI models get deprecated in a couple of weeks. If you don’t have a change environment that can cope with two weeks from deprecation notice to being fully removed from your production estate, which for most banks would be incomprehensible, you can’t adopt these tools. They’re just fundamentally delivered and evolving at a different pace to what we used to manage with.

Dexter Cousins
Mark, what’s your take on the mood, the sentiment towards AI from the community banking space? And do you see there’s an opportunity there for them to be pioneers rather than followers?

Mark Bernhardi
I think, just in the same way that solutions like Engine and cloud have provided a way for community banks to punch way above their weight in terms of competing with some of the majors, I think AI presents the same opportunity. But I think, as Sam alluded to, it’s important that banks get their hygiene in order: the data governance, the data structure. I think technology simplification is key to then being able to move into the AI journey with confidence.

So I think it’s a very exciting opportunity, and some of the use cases that we’ve already seen evolve out of Starling Bank, which is what Sam alluded to, show some of the efficiency benefits and customer experience outcomes, especially around… I know there’s a lot of focus around cyber and scam prevention. I think AI offers incredible value for the community banks to tap into. Of all the stakeholders in our finance space, I think community banks have the opportunity to actually reap the greatest potential, but doing that in partnership with other community banks and peers and with technology providers, so they make sure they do that in a very risk-controlled way. But there’s no doubt that the speed of this evolution is just going to start to accelerate, and I think now is a great opportunity for banks to get ready for that.

Dexter Cousins
One other thing I’ve observed is that it feels that community banks only see M&A as an option to survive, and this perception that bigger is better. I think what Starling Bank proved is that you can be small and profitable at the same time, and with the customer numbers that they have as well, like a lot of fintechs would dream of having, the 100,000, 200,000. With AI we’ve talked a lot about the moat perhaps being distribution, and I think the great thing with fintech is there’s an additional moat, which is the regulation piece as well. You talked before, Sam, about just the cost, right? The capital upfront that you need to spend to build something like this, it’s insane, right? And it’s not to be disrespectful to others, but if you’re a couple of guys in a WeWork or in a unit in Bondi dreaming that you’ve got…

Sam Everington
You’ve got to be… It’s hundreds of millions of pounds to build the technology you need, ultimately. Whereas now with solutions like Engine, it’s accessible even at the mutual, at the community bank scale. Look what we’re doing with SBS in New Zealand. It’s a beautiful institution, a real strong centre of that community, but not a large institution. But actually Engine makes the transformation to a really modern platform a viable path for them, and something we can get done on a reasonable budget in a meaningful time frame, to have the impact they’re looking to for the community and for their members.

Dexter Cousins
Brilliant. I think many banks, many businesses would envy not just the numbers but the loyalty that they get from their customers. And I see digital as something that’s going to amplify that relationship.

Sam Everington
I think in the past people have seen it as a trade-off between having branches and presence within the community, or going with digital and mobile. But in actual fact, what Starling Bank proved is the two actually come together and develop a much deeper relationship. It’s always been approached as a cost-saving exercise for the bank, whereas actually it’s enabling and empowering customers, giving them the freedom to do what they want when they want. It doesn’t need to be at the expense of the human interaction, the human-enabled contact centres, the branches there at the centre of the community. It augments and enhances those, and gives the staff, the employees of the bank, more time for customers rather than…

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, you touched on something there that I think is really important and doesn’t get talked about enough in the whole technology conversation, which is actually the cultural element of it. Where I’ve seen it work really well is where you do have that startup mentality. So like an Engine by Starling: move fast and make things, because we can’t break them, because we’re heavily regulated. But also that you’ve got these joint values, this joint behaviour set of being the real challengers, being super resourceful, having to get outcomes and results with very limited resources. How have you found that that startup mentality has helped you?

Sam Everington
Probably more the alignment in purpose and values, as I think you were getting to there. Starling exists to deliver better banking, deliver better outcomes for customers. It’s pioneering banking for enterprising people. And the community banks exist to serve their members, to serve their communities, and that’s very different from a large PLC that is oddly obligated to serve the interests of it. And so I think that’s where the real alignment comes from. These organisations come together and you realise they’re trying to do the same things in the same way for the communities they serve.

And most importantly, those communities, those people, families, business owners, have the same needs and problems. It’s been one of the most interesting bits for me on this journey: leaving the UK, getting the chance to meet banks in a whole number of different markets and different regions. Fundamentally their customers want the same things from their financial institutions. They have the same challenges and problems in life. And so the things we’re coming up with in Britain to help them work in Australia, that AMP come up with, that Salt’s come up with in Romania, that Tangerine come up with in Canada. They’re all serving the same segments of customers with the same needs, and all having different ideas and approaches to do that. And we’re building this community of like-minded banks that learn from each other’s experience and benefit in that way as well.

We got them all together, actually, for the first time back in April. They all came together for a couple of days, and it was a tiny bit of us talking, but mostly the banks talking to each other and showing the things they’ve done and the outcomes they had. And not just the things that went really well: did you stick that in a press release and make the most of it? The real valuable lessons come from the things that didn’t go as you’d expect, that you wouldn’t be willing to talk about to the same extent in public. But in a closed room of like-minded banks, you can have a real openness to learn from each other. And the dynamic there was just beautiful. I really, really enjoyed it.

Mark Bernhardi
And I think what you’re picking up on, equally: a lot of providers out there operate at one speed, and then they’re selling into community, they’re also operating at a different speed. For me, the real difference with Engine is that we had Starling Bank sitting in the middle. And so what Starling Bank brought to our customers is how you operationalise all of this change that’s taking place. It keeps the integrity of Engine, because everything we build goes straight into Starling Bank, goes straight into our customers. So we can’t be too disconnected. It’s the same managed service that we have to provide for all of our customers.

So I think part of our value proposition is giving visibility to that Starling Bank operating model. How does Starling Bank all this change? How does AMP inject all this shape? And letting other peers take that on board, and think about how they need to make changes internally so they can move at pace, not just with the technology coming down to them, but also with the people and operations functions at the same pace.

Dexter Cousins
And from a talent perspective, what does it mean for the types of people that you look for? What are the qualities that you need in people, and what are maybe some of the qualities that haven’t worked out quite as well as others? Because everybody’s made that mistake, right?

Sam Everington
What doesn’t work out is egos, right? That’s where things get difficult: people who are doing it for themselves, trying to take the credit to make their own name, in a purposeful, outcome-focused institution. You need creative people that have had a good range of knowledge, experience, background, but are also willing to offer opinions beyond their scope. None of us know the answer. There’s rarely a perfect answer to be found. And so you’re using a collection of different people’s experience and judgements to go, okay, let’s try that and see if it works, and you own that decision and you own that outcome as a group, as a team. And I think that’s when things are most effective. So you can’t afford the egos, but you need creative people that are willing to offer an opinion and stick their neck out, take a risk, make a suggestion, whether it’s their area of expertise or not.

Dexter Cousins
And what have you found, Mark? Because you’re building the team here in Oz. What are some of the things that you’re looking for?

Mark Bernhardi
Well, I have to build on Sam, because I agree with all of that. We ultimately are entering into deep partnerships. The success of the engineering market is only going to be there if we’re seeing the success of SBS and we’re seeing the success of AMP. So for me, I’m looking for people that are going to collaborate, get into the boat with our customers, with our partners, and be focused on how do we get to those outcomes and deliver those outcomes. So I think it’s exactly what Sam mentioned: moving away from egos, and just thinking about yourself and how you control the remit of your responsibility or accountability, and actually starting to put yourself into the shoes of your customers, understanding what they need to get done, and leading from their perspective.

Dexter Cousins
We’re coming to a wrap, but before we do, I’ve got to ask you both: what’s got you excited about Australia right now?

Mark Bernhardi
What am I talking about? As I mentioned, I think we’re at an unprecedented point in can change. I think some of the technology that’s now available to our community banks… I’m a big fan of community banks. I think we’ve seen in many markets that the more options customers have… I think the backbone of financial and growth for our country is providing customers with alternatives that they can go to, whether it’s community banks or fintechs or the majors. So I’m passionate about bringing community banks the same technology that I think of har is really exclusive to our mers, and seeing some of the experiences that we’re able to deliver through those partnerships, that I think will bring much better outcomes for customers right across Australia.

Dexter Cousins
It’s a great point, because if I look back to 2018, when we had all the RADI licences and the emergence of neobanks, the question that I had then was, hey, why do we need more banking licences? We’ve got 110 or 20, I think, at the time. Is it not about making these banks more competitive? And I think the noise from the Royal Commission, as well as the government push, which was fantastic, and we all benefited from it. But I think to your point, the comparison that was made with what’s happening in the UK with Starling, with Revolut, with Monzo, wasn’t really as relevant to Australia, because the big four banks were way ahead on the technology front, because they’d done pretty well out of the whole GFC. They were all profitable, so they were able to invest and double down on tech. So that opportunity for a yellow bank to come and compete perhaps wasn’t there. And ultimately what perhaps you should have been doing is what you guys are doing now, right? Level the playing field for the others.

Sam Everington
So Australia has all the foundations you need, from modern real-time payment rails to a modern, forward-thinking, competition-encouraging regulator. You’ve got the foundational basis. There’s no constraint that stops this happening. And that’s what keeps it interesting. Even open banking: it hasn’t worked out the way people think it has, but it’s a much better implementation than we’ve seen in other markets, because the regulators studied the impact and what worked and what didn’t elsewhere, and have learned lessons from that. And so I think it’s got an environment that is well set up to enable change, to enable different outcomes for customers. It’s now a case of the institutions here taking that leap and making some bold decisions, ultimately those difficult bets that executives have to. But that, combined with the AI discussion we’re having, I think we’re at that point where there’s no choice. You have to do that now.

Dexter Cousins
Well, quite a few of those executives actually listen to the show. So if they are listening and they want to find out more about Engine by Starling, where’s the best place for them to head?

Mark Bernhardi
Well, you can find my profile on LinkedIn, so you can reach out to me on LinkedIn, or go to enginebystarling.com and find our details there.

Sam Everington
Yeah, we’d love to get in touch.

Dexter Cousins
Awesome. We also get amazing talent listening to the show as well. If anybody’s interested in finding out about careers at Starling, where’s the best place to head?

Sam Everington
Yep, on the website. It’s got our careers page. Here’s our second-biggest office now, so we’ve got quite a sizeable team here, both client-facing teams and on the engineering side as well.

Dexter Cousins
Great. It’s a great city for talent, and for living and working in as well.

Well, Sam, Mark, thank you so much for joining me, and for inviting me along to your beautiful stand this morning. Great time. As always, you can connect with me on LinkedIn and X. If you’re new to the show, make sure you follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. If you’re watching on YouTube, give us a follow, a like and a subscribe. And if you’re coming back, thank you so much for your support. It really does help me in getting great guests along like Sam and Mark. Until the next episode, keep well.

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