Salt Bank rolls out financial app in Romania with Engine by Starling

By Gloria Methri

Salt Bank has become Romania’s newest digital challenger with the launch of its app-based offering on the Engine by Starling platform.

In partnership with Engine, Salt built and launched the bank in under 12 months. Regulated by the National Bank of Romania, the neobank offers retail customers transaction accounts in local and 16 foreign currencies, as well as deposit protection of up to 100,000 euros.

This is the first time Starling’s Engine platform has been deployed beyond the UK, which Salt will leverage to disrupt the banking sector in Romania.

Gabriela Nistor, CEO of Salt Bank, said, “A year ago, we had only two things: we had a powerful idea to help Romanian customers and a first line of code. Since then, we’ve taken a huge “salt” (Romanian for ‘leap’) in technology and banking for the Romanian market. It’s clearly resonated; we’ve now onboarded 100,000 customers in just 2 weeks and have become the top downloaded financial app in Romania. By working with Engine, we were able to realise our ambitions at pace and we’re only just getting started.”

Salt’s banking app offers rich digital products and features, including Saving Spaces, Spending Insights, in-app card controls, and Apple and Google Pay in-app provisioning. Salt is also offering 3% interest on current account balances and on each Saving Space created, as well as a Platinum Debit Mastercard for pre-enrolled customers, which unlocks benefits such as travel insurance and local airport lounge access.

Like Starling Bank, Salt has chosen to retain human touchpoints for customer service. 24/7 support is available via agents in a dedicated Care Centre that leverages Engine’s contact centre capability and single customer view.

Sam Everington, CEO of Engine by Starling, added, “The Engine platform was built to power Starling Bank in the UK, which supports more than four million retail and small business accounts. Our work with Salt Bank shows just what our platform is capable of; Starling’s feature-rich and highly personalisable banking products can be deployed around the world to attract impressive customer volumes, while our operational experience and cloud expertise can help build, launch and run a bank in less than 12 months.”