Starling Bank is launching a new payment capability, powered by its Starling Intelligence agentic AI platform, that enables retail customers to set up payments quickly and easily simply by speaking to the app on their phone.
The ‘talk to transact’ feature means personal and joint account holders will be able to issue voice or natural language prompts, such as “Pay the plumber £200” or “Send Mum £20 for lunch”. The in-app Starling Assistant will then set up the payment, which the customer can authorise with a screen tap.
This capability will be rolled out to all retail customers by the end of the year.* Small business customers will soon get a similar feature too, enabling them to instruct the Starling Assistant to “Pay this invoice” while uploading an image of the bill to be settled.**
“Agentic payments are following mobile wallets as the next evolution of payments here in the UK. Gone is the need for multiple payment screens and laboriously inputting payment details. Now, payments and transfers can happen with a simple natural language conversation,” said Harriet Rees, Group CIO at Starling.
“The next step of agentic commerce will be a powerful tool that transforms our relationship with money. Its deep insight and resources will help people find the best deals and make more informed purchases based on their individual needs,” Rees continued. “Starling is at the forefront of this technology, and we have big plans for the year ahead.”
In the Financial Services AI Adoption plan, which Rees co-authored as a UK Government AI Champion for Financial Services, she addresses the need for continued collaboration between Government, regulators and industry to modernise UK payment services. One goal is to ensure UK consumers can benefit from agentic commerce in full.
The bank’s agentic payments offering accompanies a string of updates to its Starling Assistant, which can carry out numerous tasks on a customer’s behalf, from analysing direct debits and subscriptions to building personalised budgets and creating Spaces.
Since launching a programme of Smart Tools, or pre-configured AI prompts, in August, Starling has released 14 tools including a holiday spending analyser, an occasional cost calculator, and a 50/30/20 budget planner.
The bank has committed to dropping a new smart tool every week until the end of the year. Customers can already suggest new tools and in future will be able to build their own tools directly within the Starling app that are based on their own needs. This is all part of Starling Intelligence, which includes the bank’s platform of AI-powered tools. Most customers will experience it through Starling Assistant.
