Two of the UK’s most prominent FinTech scaleups have been accused of altering their own Wikipedia pages to make them seem more positive.
Challenger bank Starling Bank and Curve, the company collecting users’ payment solutions under one card, are both facing fresh accusations of having doctored their entries on the online encyclopaedia.
An alleged Curve employee edited the Controversy section in the startup’s Wikipedia page in December, The Telegraph reported. The section included accusations that Curve had fudged its numbers about how much its users used the solution.
A report in Business Insider had stated that only 14% of Curve’s users actively used the business’ solutions. In a recent interview, Curve’s founder Shachar Bialick shot back at the rumours, saying that the figures were wrong and that the real figure was around 80%. He also accused the media of publishing “lies” and “untruths”.
A Curve spokesperson told The Telegraph that the company has always adhered to Wikipedia’s strict guidelines.
The company has previously faced criticism for not being transparent enough to its investors when it raised a £6m crowdfunding campaign in 2019.
Bialick has responded that it was “not the right thing to provide any information” as it could give Curve’s competitors an edge. He added that crowdfunding investors should just trust the due diligence carried out by institutional investors.
The accusations levied against Starling Bank stem from a Wikipedia user who published a document claiming to show how the digital lender’s employees planned to rewrite the encyclopaedia entry about the company to make it more positive.
A spokesperson from Starling Bank confirmed that an internal document existed that discussed that the Wikipedia page had been flagged as “too promotional” and that it sounded like an advertisement. However, the company representative denied that anyone at Starling Bank had doctored the entry.
Starling Bank founder and CEO Anne Boden’s Wikipedia page was updated this week with a banner. The banner stated that “a major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject.”
Another flagged issue was that a Wikipedia user had almost exclusively been used to edit the challenger bank’s Wikipedia page, including deleting a section Starling Bank having missed its deadline to launch in Ireland. The challenger bank stated in March last year that it would launch in Ireland later in 2019, The Irish Times reported.
A spokesperson from Starling denied that the digital lender had anything to do with that account. Although the spokesperson admitted that one employee had been editing the Wikipedia entry about Starling Bank in 2018 to remove “inaccuracies”.
Starling Bank recently faced a backlash in December 2019 when it was revealed ithat it had only lent 1% of the £913m it had promised to lend to SMEs by 2023. This caused concerns that Starling Bank would fail to deliver on its promise.
The FinTech stated that it was confident that it would live up to its commitment by the deadline. The pledge to make £913m available to lend for SMEs was delivered as part of Starling Bank accepting a £100m grant from the Royal Bank of Scotland’s Capability and Innovation Fund. The fund was set up as part of the big bank’s £45bn bailout agreement with the government.
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