'We’ve removed the biggest barrier to customer AI adoption: writer’s block' — Starling Bank AI boss on why agentic AI could be the key to help customers manage their money better

AI is helping revolutionise industries everywhere, but it can also have benefits for customers and consumers.

In the banking sector, AI is set to bring significant changes, with smart tools able to help customers overcome the biggest limitation of AI prompting: knowing what to ask.

The last 18 months have seen Starling launch a suite of customer-facing generative and agentic AI tools, and we spoke to its deputy CIO Frederic Laurent to find out more.

Most banks are using AI behind the scenes, but Starling is really dialling up its customer facing tools.

What are you hoping to achieve here? When we received our banking licence ten years ago, we were part of a breed of challenger banks that pioneered app based banking.

We’ve applied our tech expertise to solve so many customer problems in that time, from tools that help customers control their gambling; lock their card if they lose it; or get spending insights about where their money really goes.

Many are now at play at traditional banks today.

But there are so many more problems that technology hasn’t been able to address yet; the UK’s financial literacy levels are low, many people don’t feel fully in control of their money, and scams are on the rise.

Those are just a few of the challenges we think AI can tackle.

Granted, some of these challenges like fighting fraud can be addressed with back office AI applications.

But it would be a shame to only use this technology behind the scenes, when it could have far greater impact in customers’ hands.

We therefore knew that when AI hit the public arena, and was no longer the reserve of technology teams, we should be ready to roll out customer facing AI tools of our own.

We saw the launch of customer facing LLMs as that trigger point and, using Google’s Gemini models, we’ve rolled out a number of tools that were first to market.

Our Spending Insights tool uses Gen AI to help customers interrogate their spending using natural language; finding out how much you spent on takeaways last month can make you seriously reconsider your budget.