Guidance

Directions issued to Starling Bank about breaches of the Retail Banking Order

Directions issued by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to Starling Bank to ensure it complies with Part 3 and Article 45 of the Retail Banking Order.

• From: Competition and Markets Authority
• Published: 13 May 2025

Documents

Directions to Starling Bank Limited issued under the Retail Banking Market Investigation Order

PDF, 237 KB, 16 pages

Starling Bank's action plan

PDF, 76.9 KB, 1 page

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Details

Part 3 of the Order provides the Service Quality Indicator (SQI) remedy. The purpose of the SQI remedy is to provide consumers and SMEs with the results of surveys on banks’ quality of service. This helps consumers and SMEs to decide which banks they would like to bank with. Specifically, Article 16 requires banks to provide details of customers to a market research company, who will undertake the surveys. Starling Bank breached Article 16 within Part 3 of the Order by excluding around 17% of Starling Bank’s Personal Current Account (PCA) customers from the data provided to the market research company in both December 2023 and June 2024.

Article 45 of the Order requires banks to provide the number of PCA and Business Current Account customers they have to the CMA. This in turn allows the cost of the SQI surveys referred to above to be split fairly between the banks. Starling Bank breached Article 45 of the Order between 2020 and 2023 by over-reporting the number of accounts held by their customers, as part of their annual report to the CMA.

Published 13 May 2025