Starling launches AI chatbot Spending Intelligence in UK banking first

Finding out how much money you spent on coffee last month will soon become a faster exercise than trawling through bank statements or paying for a budgeting app to work it out.

That's because Starling Bank is ramping up its use of Artificial Intelligence for current account customers.

It has become the first bank in the UK to integrate its very own Large Language Model (LLM) AI chatbot within its banking app.

The chatbot, called Spending Intelligence, uses LLMs to answer questions customers pose to it about their spending.

Starling's chatbot is powered by Gemini, Google's LLM and answer to OpenAI's ChatGPT, a move which made sense for Starling as the bank houses its tech with Google Cloud Platform.

It's available to all customers, both personal and business accounts - sole and joint - from today.

Spending Intelligence appears as a search bar and sits at the top of Starling's legacy 'spending' area within Starling's banking app.

The spending area gives customers information about how much they spend, where they spend it and when. It can be split up into more than 50 categories which customers can customise.

Starling's AI chatbot takes the spending area a step further by providing answers to customers about their spending within a specific period of time, for example within the last month or year, and showing them a breakdown.

Customers can ask it questions like 'how much did I spend on groceries last week?' or 'how much did I donate to charity last year?'

These questions can either be typed into the search bar or customers can ask the chatbot verbally.

Spending Intelligence can only draw insights from Starling accounts and gives answers based on this data.

The chatbot cannot tell customers what to do with their money - for example where to invest it or how to save more money - as this would fall into the remit of regulated advice.

But the idea is to get customers to think about how they are spending. The hope is that it will help customers to see exactly where their money goes

The Starling chatbot is free to use and chief information officer Harriet Rees says there are 'absolutely no plans to make it paid for use'.

The Spending Intelligence chatbot is the first step towards a bigger ambition to implement AI within its banking app.

The hope is it will nudge customers towards using more of its existing money management features as well as new tools Starling develops in the future.

Rees says: 'Customers can use AI to feed their natural curiosity about their finances so that they can make informed decisions about their budgeting, and better utilise Starling's suite of money management tools.'

While customers will learn about their spending habits by using the chatbot, at the same time Starling will be learning from its customers through the questions they ask to identify areas where it can roll out more AI in the future.

Read More

'This is the first step for us of putting AI in the hands of customers' Rees tells This is Money.

'But there's so much further we could go' she adds.

These could include fraud detection and new customer onboarding according to Rees.

The information Starling receives from customers through the questions they ask cannot be used by Google's Gemini to feed its Large Language Models, this is part of Starling's agreement with Google.

Starling said: 'Customers have to opt in to use Spending Intelligence. It does not store sensitive information and customers can opt out at any time.'

In the future Spending Intelligence could potentially evolve into telling customers how they could save money if they were to ask the chatbot to identify areas.

But for the moment it is focused solely on spending.

Rees says: 'We're having a think about how you could save. But we genuinely believe giving customers insights about how they are spending is the best way to get them thinking about where they could save.'