The bank opened the accounts up to sole traders earlier this year.

At the MoneyLive Lending 2018 event in London, Megan Caywood, chief platform officer at Starling Bank (pictured above), said: “We started with a retail current account and then we launched business accounts, first for limited companies with a single director and now for sole traders as well, and soon for multi-director limited companies.

“Very much focusing on the SME space of one to 10 employees.”

Megan explained that it was also building out its marketplace.

“Within lending, particularly on the SME side, there’s a whole host of different products that our customers might need, from invoice financing to term lending to flexible credit facilities.

“For that we’re integrating a number of different partners to fulfil customer’s needs.”

She also announced that the bank would offer its own products to compete in the marketplace with those from other companies.

“We’re very happy to see fintechs as collaborators as well as competition and to compete against those various offerings inside the Starling app,” she added.

“That’s something we’re currently working on that will be coming later this year.”

With regards to Starling’s plans for global expansion, Megan confirmed which countries the bank was looking to move its product into next.

“The first thing that we’re looking at is expanding into areas in the EU that are a stronghold of UK expats, where we can offer our product…

“We obviously want to be in the US as well.”

She also addressed a question about the specialist bank potentially expanding into Asia.

“We want to be a global bank and we want to eventually expand there, but not currently, we’re first looking at [the] EU and the US.”