Starling Bank – Savings Tracker

Starling bank is what is commonly referred to as a challenger bank. They do not have branches on the high street. You will only find them online and on your portable devices. To get an account, you follow a signup process using their app on your phone or tablet and once accepted you get a debit card in the post.

You can use them as a normal bank as you get a sort code, account number and all the other relevant bits. You can even set up Direct Debits.

Once you have an account, unlike the mainstream banks – you can signup for a developer account. This will then allow you to access your bank via code. It is this code that I am going to use to create a savings tracker.

Getting Started

What you will require

  • Raspberry Pi fully setup running Raspbian
  • A personal Starling Bank Account
  • A Starling Bank developer Account

I am not going to go through the creation of a Starling bank developer account here as it is complex and would fill the blog! However – if people ask @talktech on twitter, I may relent.

Assuming you have all the above now setup, let’s move to the Raspberry Pi side of things

Raspberry Pi Python 3 Library

Let’s install the unofficial Starling bank python library. This is done on the command line, so connect to your Raspberry Pi, either over SSH or directly and get a terminal running.

Now, in the terminal enter the following code:

sudo pip3 install starlingbank

This will download and install the Python3 package for you. It may take a few minutes, but once it’s complete you can start using it.