Engine by Starling has launched Romania's first ever digitally-native bank on its core banking platform. Salt Bank has already onboarded 100,000 Romanian customers, making it one of the fastest growing neobanks in Southeastern Europe.

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. The new bank launches as the most downloaded financial app in Romania, and holds ambitious plans to reach one million customers in three years.

By partnering with Engine, Salt was able to build and launch the bank in under 12 months. Regulated by the National Bank of Romania, Salt offers transaction accounts in local and 16 foreign currencies for retail customers, as well as deposit protection up to the limit of 100,000 euros, which is guaranteed by the Romanian Bank Deposit Guarantee Fund.

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 comes with 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 - in a unique marketing concept through which the first customers become Founders of the bank.

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

Sam Everington, CEO of Engine by Starling, adds: “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.”  

Engine announced Salt as its first customer in November 2023, followed by AMP Bank in Australia, which will be launching a new digital bank offer targeting the small business and consumer markets in 2025.