LONDON — British digital bank Starling expects to go public in two years’ time, CEO and founder Anne Boden said Tuesday.
An initial public offering is “a year or two off,” Boden told reporters. “It’s at least one year away. But we’re talking about one or two years away.”
Starling, which counts Goldman Sachs, Fidelity Investments and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund as investors, is one of the U.K.’s leading challenger banks.
Along with other start-up competitors like Monzo and Revolut, Starling has attracted millions of users through only an app and a linked payment card — no physical branches.
Boden said Starling’s IPO was likely to take place in London, where the company is headquartered.
“I very much hope we can do it in London,” she said. “I think that would be the default option, unless we’re persuaded otherwise.”
A stock market debut for Starling would add to a series of high-profile floats in the U.K.’s fledgling technology sector.
Fellow fintech firm Wiselisted directly on the London Stock Exchange at an $11 billion valuation earlier this year. Food delivery giant Deliveroo had less success with its IPO, with shares sinking as much as 30% on the first day of trading.
Though Britain has produced successful tech companies like Google-owned artificial intelligence firm DeepMind and Arm, the chip designer being sold by SoftBank to Nvidia, it has yet to mint publicly-listed tech companies of a scale matching that of those in the U.S. or China.
Founded in 2014, Starling began life offering fee-free checking accounts through an app. It has since branched into lending and business banking, both of which helped the company break even recently.
The early days of Starling were marred by a bitter dispute between Boden and co-founder Tom Blomfield, who left to start rival online bank Monzo. The spat was the subject of a book released by Boden last year, called “Banking On It.”
“It occurred to me that, up until now, I’d always marked our progress against Monzo, since they were our rival challenger bank and had launched at almost the same time,” Boden said in a new print version of her book, which is due to be released Thursday.
“The extraordinary experiences of the year 2020 made it clearer than ever that our competitors are now Lloyds, Barclays et al.”
Still, the challengers remain some way away from stealing significant market share from much larger incumbents. Starling, which was last privately valued at $1.5 billion, made £97.6 million ($133.2 million) in 2019, a figure that pales in comparison to that of traditional lenders like HSBC, Barclays and NatWest.
Bitcoin slumped on Tuesday as a spike in Treasury yields weighed on risk assets broadly.
The price of the flagship cryptocurrency was last lower by 4.8% at $97,183.80, according to Coin Metrics. The broader market of cryptocurrencies, as measured by the CoinDesk 20 index, dropped more than 5%.
The moves followed a sudden increase in the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield after data released by the Institute for Supply Management reflected faster-than-expected growth in the U.S. services sector in December, adding to concerns about stickier inflation. Rising yields tend to pressure growth oriented risk assets.
Bitcoin traded above $102,000 on Monday and is widely expected to about double this year from that level. Investors are hopeful that clearer regulation will support digital asset prices and in turn benefit stocks like Coinbase and Robinhood.
However, uncertainty about the path of Federal Reserve interest rate cuts could put bumps in the road for crypto prices. In December, the central bank signaled that although it was cutting rates a third time, it may do fewer rate cuts in 2025 than investors had anticipated. Historically, rate cuts have had a positive effect on bitcoin price while hikes have had a negative impact.
Bitcoin is up more than 3% since the start of the year. It posted a 120% gain for 2024.
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The company, which offers a range of direct-to-consumer treatments for conditions like weight loss, erectile dysfunction and hair loss, is the latest in a string of tech companies that have tried to curry favor with the incoming administration. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta both announced $1 million donations to the inaugural fund late last year, and Amazon and Apple CEO Tim Cook have also reportedly contributed.
“At Hims & Hers, we stand with leaders and advocates who are committed to improving America’s broken healthcare system,” the company said in a statement to CNBC.
Hims & Hers was a breakout star in the digital health sector last year, largely thanks to the success of its popular new weight loss offering.
The company began prescribing compounded semaglutide through its platform in May after launching a weight loss program late in 2023. Semaglutide is the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk‘s blockbuster medications Ozempic and Wegovy, which can cost around $1,000 a month without insurance. Compounded semaglutide is a cheaper, custom-made alternative to the brand drugs and can be produced when the brand-name treatments are in shortage.
The future of compounded GLP-1s in the U.S. is not entirely clear, especially as members of Trump’s circle have expressed conflicting opinions about the drugs more broadly. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has criticized GLP-1s. He told CNBC in an interview that “the first line of response” to obesity should be lifestyle changes, though he added that “GLP drugs have a place.”
Dr. Marty Makary, Trump’s pick to lead the Food and Drug Administration, has served as an executive of the telehealth company Sesame, which connects consumers to physicians who can prescribe compounded GLP-1s. However, Makary’s role at Sesame has been mostly ceremonial in recent years.
Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO who has been a close confidant of Trump’s since the election, has openly expressed his support for the medications.
“Nothing would do more to improve the health, lifespan and quality of life for Americans than making GLP inhibitors super low cost to the public,” Musk wrote in a post on his social media platform X in December.
At an event with reporters in New York City late last year, which was attended by CNBC, Hims & Hers said it would work with the incoming administration and share the company’s point of view about the value of the medications.
Meta on Tuesday announced it will eliminate its third-party fact-checking program to “restore free expression” and move to a “Community Notes” model, similar to the system that exists on Elon Musk‘s platform X.
The company said Community Notes will be written and rated by contributing users to provide more context to posts across its platforms, and the feature will roll out in the U.S. over the next couple of months. The announcement marks Meta’s latest attempt to smooth over relations with Republican President-elect Donald Trump before he takes office.
“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes, and too much censorship,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday in a video announcement. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech, so we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our polices and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
Zuckerberg said the third-party fact-checkers have been “too politically biased” and have “destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
Meta said it will simplify its content policies by removing restrictions on subjects like immigration and gender and implement a new approach to policy enforcement that will focus on illegal and high-severity violations. The company is moving its trust and safety and content moderation teams from California, a historically Democratic state, to Texas, a historically Republican state.
“We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” Zuckerberg said.
Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan addressed Meta’s announcement in an interview Tuesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” stating, “We should have an economy where the decisions of a single company or a single executive are not having extraordinary impact on speech online.”
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s head of global policy, appeared Tuesday on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” and said Meta thinks the Community Notes system on Musk’s platform X has been working “really well.” Musk, who has been a vocal advocate for Trump online and donated millions of dollars to his campaign, has been in close contact with the president-elect since the election.
Last week, Meta said that Kaplan would become the company’s top policy officer, succeeding Nick Clegg, who was a former British deputy prime minister and a leader of Britain’s centrist Liberal Democrats party.
Kaplan, who has held several policy-related positions at Meta since joining the company in 2011 when it was still named Facebook, is well known within the Republican Party. He was a White House deputy chief of staff under former President George W. Bush and also once worked as a law clerk for former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
In December, Kaplan revealed in a Facebook post that he joined Vice President-elect JD Vance and Trump during their recent visit at the New York Stock Exchange.
“We want to make it so that, bottom line, if you can say it on TV, you say it on the floor of Congress, you certainly ought to be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship,” Kaplan said Tuesday.
Meta’s Oversight Board, which provides an independent check of the company’s content moderation, lauded the company’s changes on Tuesday.
“The Oversight Board welcomes the news that Meta will revise its approach to fact-checking, with the goal of finding a scalable solution to enhance trust, free speech and user voice on its platforms,” the board told CNBC in a statement, adding that “specifically in the United States, rightly or wrongly, Meta’s previous approach has been perceived as politically biased by many of its users.”
Prominent Republican lawmakers have previously criticized Meta and other technology companies for allegations regarding the censorship of conservative voices on their respective platforms. For instance, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, subpoenaed Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs in 2023 as part of a probe to “understand how and to what extent the Executive Branch coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech.”
Zuckerberg has had a rocky relationship with Trump over the years, with the president-elect more recently describing Facebook as an “enemy of the people” in a March interview with CNBC. Meta levied a two-year suspension on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in 2021 shortly after the company determined that the former president’s actions following the Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C., could potentially incite more violence.
In 2023, Trump was able to regain access to his Facebook and Instagram accounts, but he also faced some restrictions and potential penalties if he were to violate the company’s community guidelines. Meta eventually removed Trump’s account-related restrictions in July during the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
The company has taken additional steps to appease the incoming administration in recent months. On Monday, Meta announced Dana White, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a longtime friend of Trump, is joining its board.
Following Trump’s presidential victory in November, Zuckerberg joined a number of other big technology executives who visited the president-elect at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, and in December, Meta confirmed a $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund.
