Starling Bank is putting Generative AI into the hands of its customers with the roll out of a new 'Spending Intelligence' Large Language Model that customers can interrogate to get insights into their spending habits.
Starling's chatbot, built on Google's LLM Gemini, is being rolled out to all customers from today.
Harriet Rees, Starling CIO, says: “At Starling we believe that knowledge is power, and it’s the first step to taking active control of your money. Now, 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, ” said .
Spending Intelligence operates within a search bar on the Starlingg app, enabling customers to post questions about their spending over a specific period of time, such as 'how much did I donate to charity last year?' ot 'what did I spend on groeries last week?'.
Questions can either be typed into the search bar or customers can ask the chatbot verbally.
Spending Intelligence might suggest that frequent travellers ask the tool for holiday spending analysis; for commuters to check their spend on bus and train fares; or for serial diners to check their spend on meals out. Once a prompt is selected or a question asked, the customer receives a graph and analytics that help them build a bigger picture of their spending habits over time.
Starling finance chief Declan Ferguson, says: "Really pleased to be the first UK Bank to putting generative AI in the hands of our customers. This feature, powered by Google’s Gemini, is our first step towards a bigger ambition to implement AI within our banking app to all customers."
Speaking at Money20/20 last week, Ferguson said the bank intends to hire another 400 software engineers this year asit accelerates the development of AI across the organisation.
Spending Intelligence follows a number of AI innovations developed by Starling on its Google Cloud infrastructure, including solutions for cybersecurity, fraud prevention and customer service.