Fintech rising star poached by Barclays

High flyer Meghan Caywood, Starling Bank’s chief platform officer, leaves the digital bank for a high street rival.

Starling Bank’s chief platform officer Meghan Caywood has been poached by high street rival Barclays.

Caywood, 30, joined Barclays this month after almost three years at the digital bank, where she held the key post of overseeing the financial services used by the site 400,000 customers.

She becomes a managing director of the high street lender in charge of consumer strategy.

US-born Caywood oversaw the bank’s Marketplace operations, where it sells such products as investment, insurance and mortgage services to its customers, usually through third parties.

The firm said its Marketplace business will now be overseen by product director Ben Chisell and head of retail banking Helen Bierton.

Starling Bank added: “Ben will be responsible for Marketplace product development, while Helen will take on responsibility for commercial relationships.”

Caywood left Starling last month after joining the business in June 2016, a few years after it was launched by former RBS executive Anne Boden in 2014.

Prior to Starling, Caywood spent just under four years working in California as a global product manager for cloud accounting firm Xero, and before that as a product manager for financial software business Intuit.

Caywood studied cognitive science at Stanford University, and earlier, at Pepperdine University, where she also founded its Entrepreneur Club.