How Starling Bank uses AI

On 24 August 2026 Starling Bank launched an agentic version of its Starling Assistant for all business customers, a free in app tool that carries out banking commands for small businesses. It can move a share of earnings into a tax Space, check supplier invoices for signs of fraud, and guide sole traders and landlords through Making Tax Digital for Income Tax. Starling has not published usage or time saved figures for the business version.

Starling Assistant is an agentic AI assistant in the Starling app that responds to text and voice, analyzes spending patterns, creates savings Spaces and sets up transfers on the customer's behalf. In August 2026 Starling added "smart tools" to it and said new ones would follow every week for the rest of 2026 and at least monthly after that.

The launch set includes a tax saver that sweeps a share of the transactions a small business picks into a Space, a Making Tax Digital guide, a spending quiz and a student budget planner. A rainy day saver, which works out with the customer how much they can realistically save and sets up transfers into a savings Space, was announced as a follow up tool. The assistant is built on Google's Gemini models. No outcome figures are disclosed.

Starling launched Scam Intelligence in October 2025, letting customers upload marketplace ads and messages so a Gemini based model can flag signs of a purchase scam before they pay. In June 2026 the feature became an agent inside Starling Assistant, available to its five million customers: when a customer describes a planned transfer that looks like a romance, investment or other scam, the assistant asks probing questions, gives its view and suggests a call with the support team. Use is opt in and data stays in the bank's cloud environment.