Starling Adds Agentic AI to UK Banking App

Starling has added an agentic artificial intelligence (AI) financial assistant to its banking app in the United Kingdom.

The company began rolling out the new Starling Assistant to personal account customers on Friday (March 20) and plans to extend it to business and joint accounts soon, Starling said in a Friday press release.

Starling Assistant responds to voice and natural language prompts and then carries out banking tasks on the customer’s behalf, according to the release.

It can help customers manage their day-to-day finances, gain personalized financial insights and get general banking guidance, the release said.

For example, Starling Assistant can set up automatic transfers, generate a quiz to help users understand their spending patterns, and teach a user how to set up Apple Pay, per the release.

“It’s time to embrace a new era of banking, one that’s powered by agentic AI,” Harriet Rees, group chief information officer at Starling, said in the release. “At Starling, we want to encourage our customers to trust that AI can help them with money management, and we’re excited to be pioneering the use of this cutting-edge technology to help people be good with money.”

Starling Assistant is built with Google Gemini running on the Google Cloud platform, according to the release.

The AI assistant is available on an opt-in basis, all data is stored in Starling’s Google Cloud environment and no data is used for training purposes, per the release.

“AI is fundamentally changing how people interact with their finances,” Graham Drury, director, FSI, Google Cloud in the U.K. and Ireland, said in the release. “We are moving away from clicking through menus and navigating complex apps, toward simply having a conversation about your money.”

Starling said in October that it added an AI-powered scam detection tool called Scam Intelligence to its app. Scam Intelligence is designed to warn customers against specific indicators of scams and inform them about what to look out for in future transactions.

In June, the company added an AI banking tool called Spending Intelligence that helps customers understand their spending habits by answering questions such as, “How much did I spend on groceries last week?”

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Is AI the Master Key to Banking’s Next Era?” found that personalizing customer experiences is the top projected growth area for AI use in banking.

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