When Starling Bank was granted funding from Royal Bank of Scotland, the challenger bank promised to lend £913m to SMEs by 2023.
However, figures seen by the Sunday Times suggest that the digital bank has only lent £782,000 to SMEs since it received the investment in February.
As a result, people are now concerned that the bank will not be able to live up to its commitment of investing £913m within the next four years.
While Starling Bank has tried to alleviate some of these worries by saying that this “is only the beginning” of the company’s four-year commitment, some people seem far from convinced.
“Another unicorn that turned out to be a painted donkey wearing a candle? Time will tell,” said Hermann Tischendorf, the group CTO of 4finance, the digital consumer lending company, on LinkedIn.
Others, stated that it might be a bit too early to draw any quick conclusions.
The news comes as Starling Bank’s CEO and founder Anne Boden stated in August that the venture has “entered rocket ship mode” and that it was expected to have one million users by the end of 2019 and that it would break even by the end of 2020.
It kept the first of those promises in November when it announced that Starling Bank had passed the one million accounts milestone.
Although, that is still below competitor Revolut, which as of the first half of 2019 had seven million customers, according to FinTech Global’s data.
Royal Bank of Scotland tapped into its £775m pot to give Starling Bank the investment as part of its punishment for its 2008 state £46bn bailout in 2008.
Other recipients of the £775m fund includes challenger bank Atom bank, small business lender iwoca, payments platform Modulr Finance and international payments company Currencycloud. They all received investments from Royal Bank of Scotland in August.
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