Albert is the UK’s highest rated finance app for freelancers with over 1,000 five-star ratings in the Apple app store. By dramatically simplifying and automating daily bookkeeping tasks, it aims to take away stress and fear from business financial management.

The partnership with Albert follows Starling’s recent announcement that it will be offering business accounts to entrepreneurs, small businesses and sole traders in the early New Year. Registration has now opened for customers wishing to be early innovators (register at www.getalbert.com). Selected users will be able to connect Albert directly with their Starling account which they can use for business and benefit from an experience that will be years ahead of any existing solution in the market, and a precursor to the new Open Banking regulation.

The unique Albert-Starling experience will be publicly available with the business account launch early in the New Year.

This integration will solve a major pain point for freelancers, sole traders and small businesses: time spent bookkeeping. Right now, it’s a slow and complicated experience to manually reconcile bank transactions with invoices and payments. This integration simplifies the process by automatically matching the transactions from Starling Bank with the invoices sent from the Albert app, so the two can be reconciled in a single tap, saving customers time and enabling them to spend more time on what they love: their business.

Other perks of having the two apps connected will be automated expenses (prefilled by Albert just after your payment is sent) and being able to see your account balance in real time directly from the App.

Starling Bank is the first UK bank to open its APIs in preparation for PSD2 in January 2018 and together with Albert will be the first to bring the benefits of PSD2 and Open Banking compliant partnerships to sole traders and small businesses.

Anne Boden, CEO and Founder of Starling Bank said:
To follow our announcement that we will be offering business accounts to small businesses, entrepreneurs and sole traders, Albert are the perfect partner for us as we continue to challenge conventional thinking in banking. Small businesses need to be agile and entrepreneurs should spend their time building on their ideas, not bogged down in paperwork. Starling and Albert are firmly on the side of the entrepreneur and this partnership will make their lives - and businesses - better.

Ivo Weevers, CEO and Co-Founder of Albert said:
It’s crazy that most self-employed people still don’t feel comfortable with their daily finances. These are the basic aspects of our lives that are supposed to be easy. To solve this, one needs to leapfrog the existing status quo. Albert is super thrilled to have found a perfect partner in Starling to make this vision a reality for all the self-employed.