That’s according to a report Wednesday (Nov. 4) from the Financial Times (FT), which notes that Raman Bhatia’s exit comes as the FinTech is dealing with flagging growth.
Bhatia has privately told the company’s board that he no longer wants to run Starling, three sources familiar with the matter told the FT. Those sources said Starling’s board has responded by stepping up its succession plans.
Starling declined to comment when reached by PYMNTS Wednesday.
Bhatia became CEO after a conflict between the bank’s founder and former chief Anne Boden and Starling investors over the lender’s struggling valuation growth. Boden had founded Starling in 2014 as part of a new wave of challenger banks, though stepped down when the company failed to generate the type of valuation growth as rivals like Revolut, the FT added.
Bhatia joined Starling from energy company Ovo, and had headed the digital bank for HSBC’s retail banking and wealth management operations in the U.K. and Europe.
The FT said that Starling has been dealing with restrictions imposed on it in 2021 by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) due to what the regulator called “shockingly lax” financial-crime controls.
Bhatia said that Starling was in the process of exiting these restrictions when FinTech released full-year results in May, the report added.
Meanwhile, recent PYMNTS Intelligence research finds that neobanks are spending far more on preventing fraud even as their losses from fraud keep climbing.
Fraud prevention spending by neobanks, digital-only banks and FinTechs surged 357% in a year, from $1.8 million to $8 million per institution, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Scams Get Personal: Why Banks Pay More to Fight Fraud.”
The report showed average fraud losses jumping more than 250%, from $800,000 to $2.8 million, with one measure moving in the opposite direction: The fraud-loss rate for these neobanks, digital banks and FinTechs dropped 20%, from 0.90 to 0.72 basis points.
“For neobanks, the three numbers define the trend,” PYMNTS wrote last month. “A smaller share of transaction value is being lost, but achieving that result now comes with a much larger prevention bill while absolute losses continue to rise.”
That report also noted that digital banks were already displaying some elevated exposure to fraud. Previous PYMNTS reporting, based on an earlier fraud study, showed that neobanks had a 1.1-basis-point fraud-loss rate in 2025, versus 0.8 basis points across the full sample.
