John Mountain

As Chief Operating Officer, John is responsible for IT strategy and ensuring the technology platform delivers the retail banking product required by Starling and expected by the Regulator.

After many years as a technical architect working for clients such as Lloyds and Bank of America, he became increasingly frustrated with the inefficiency and lack of commitment to improving technology at the traditional banks.

John approached Starling in mid-2015 because he was excited about the opportunity for a banking start-up that is also a technology business throughout. Since he joined, he has designed a systems landscape for a retail bank from scratch and recruited a team to work across platform, infrastructure, security and mobile.

If he wasn’t working at Starling, John would be sailing around the world (or at least to France) and probably trying to solve some software problems on the way.