Partnering with Engine by Starling, Salt Bank, a subsidiary of Banca Transilvania, built and launched a cloud-native digital bank from the ground up in just 12 months, delivering Romania’s first purely digital banking proposition and achieving rapid, sustained customer growth.

Introduction: A Market-First Digital Bank for Romania

Salt Bank is a subsidiary of Banca Transilvania, the largest bank in Southeastern Europe. With 59% of payments in Romania being contactless, and a potential market of approximately 20 million customers nationally, Salt Bank identified substantial demand for a digital bank built specifically for Romanian customers.

Engine by Starling and Salt Bank collaborated to launch Romania’s first native digital bank. Engine was selected as Salt’s core banking provider, tasked with delivering a complete, cloud-native platform that would allow the bank to stand up a market-first digital proposition in a compressed timeframe.

The Salt team had a bold vision for a smarter way for Romanian customers to bank, combining digital-native, mobile-first experiences with the safety and security of a licensed, regulated bank. Both teams shared a clear alignment of goals from the outset: Engine brought the right technology platform, approach, and experience, while Salt Bank brought the motivation to bring that technology to Romanian customers.

The Challenge: Building a Full-Featured Bank at Speed and Scale

Salt Bank set out to release a fully-featured digital bank for customers in under 12 months — an ambitious target that required a platform capable of supporting multi-currency accounts, self-serve banking features, and a fully automated onboarding process from day one.

Delivering a full, API-enabled banking platform gave Salt total freedom to design differentiated customer experiences, but this also introduced additional considerations that needed to be addressed as part of the build, including:

• Creating additional SaaS API endpoints to support new SaaS instances, including Salt Bank
• A change in base currency to support markets outside the UK
• New regulatory reporting requirements specific to the Romanian market
• The ability to support country-specific products and tax regimes

With an ambition to acquire 230,000 customers within a year and expand to millions in the medium term, scalability needed to be factored into every aspect of the project from the start.

The Solution: Engine’s Cloud-Native Banking Platform

Leveraging the technology and expertise built to power Starling Bank in the UK, Engine’s platform is cloud-native and delivered through a SaaS model, providing comprehensive capabilities that are modular, API-based, and purpose-built to launch digital banks at record speed.

Key elements of the platform and project included:

• Core platform: Engine’s cloud-native banking platform provided Salt with all the key capabilities needed to launch and run the bank, from customer support, fincrime, and onboarding to card processing and mobile SDKs, helping accelerate the mobile app build and deliver a functionally rich experience for customers. Engine pre-integrated these crucial elements into the modular call centre platform to ensure everything was operational at launch.
• Scalability: With an ambition to acquire 230,000 customers within a year and expand to millions in the medium term, scalability was factored into every aspect of the project.
• Mobile app: The new Salt Bank app harnessed the latest in document and face-capture technology, ensuring a fully automated onboarding process that mitigates aborted applications.

Through this platform, Salt Bank was able to offer transaction accounts in local currency and 17 foreign currencies for retail customers, with access to intuitive, self-serve banking features — developed and implemented in just 12 months.

Implementation Process: A Collaborative, Compressed Delivery Model

The project required close collaboration between Engine, Salt Bank, and GFT, the implementation partner on the programme, to achieve the shared goals within a compressed timeframe. Several practices proved crucial during discovery and implementation:

• In-person engagement: Rather than a remote-first, multinational delivery model, all partners agreed the project required face-to-face interaction in Bucharest. Representatives from all parties completed an intensive, six-month scoping exercise together.
• Responsive development: Collaborating in person allowed issues to be identified and resolved rapidly, in some cases within a single working day.
• Partnership culture: The team practised a ‘one team’ approach, prioritising the transparent sharing of challenges and solutions and fostering trust across all three organisations.

Benefits Achieved: Rapid Launch and Sustained Growth

Engine delivered Salt Bank in just 12 months — a global first for any digital bank build of this kind, and a milestone that made Salt Romania’s first purely digital bank. Further accomplishments include:

• Flawless launch: Zero system management failures or outages, with constant 99.99% availability.
• Founders Campaign: To encourage early adoption, Salt Bank invited the first 100,000 customers to pre-register their interest as ‘founders’ ahead of launch, receiving early access to onboarding and other benefits. The projected number of founder sign-ups was exceeded by more than 60,000.
• Phenomenal adoption: Salt Bank exceeded onboarding targets, reaching 100,000 customers just 10 days post-launch and 200,000 customers within the first month — already surpassing its end-of-2024 target of 230,000 customers, and on track to reach one million customers within three years.
• One year on: A year after launch, Salt Bank had reached 500,000 customers — 50% of its three-year plan goal achieved in just one year, representing 4% of the Romanian market population. Salt is now a Top 10 bank in Romania, with total deposits exceeding 1 billion Romanian Lei.
• Business Club: Salt has also recently launched its new ‘Business Club’, bringing new, exclusive features to Romanian freelancers and small business owners.

Conclusion: A Blueprint for Rapid Digital Bank Launches

Salt Bank’s launch demonstrates how a shared vision, close in-person collaboration, and a proven cloud-native SaaS platform can compress the timeline for standing up a full-featured digital bank from years to months. By combining Engine’s technology and delivery experience with Salt Bank’s local market conviction and GFT’s implementation expertise, the partnership delivered a flawless, scalable launch that has gone on to exceed its own ambitious growth targets — establishing Salt as a genuine challenger in the Romanian banking market.

Key Facts

Bank / FI: Salt Bank
Parent Company: Banca Transilvania
Headquarters: Romania
Technology Partner: Engine by Starling
Headquarters: United Kingdom
Implementation Partner: GFT
Solution: Engine — cloud-native core banking platform (SaaS)
Category: Digital / Neobank, Retail Banking, Core Banking
Development Timeline: 12 months