Starling Bank equips customer chatbot with AI-powered skills

Starling Bank in August 2026 added “smart tools” — a set of AI-powered skills — to its Starling Assistant chatbot to help customers manage money. The bank introduced initial tools for personalised savings, fraud protection and VAT automation, and plans to add new skills on a weekly basis.

The assistant accepts natural language and voice prompts. Early tools include Rainy Day Saver, which analyses a customer’s income, direct debits and spending to recommend an amount to save and can set up transfers into a dedicated savings account if the customer agrees. The Fraud Control skill centralises protections such as the Snatch-Theft Detector, Call Status Indicator and Scam Intelligence. Another tool automates VAT-related processes to help businesses meet Making Tax Digital requirements.

Starling developed the tools from customer feedback and from internal AI work. Engineering teams had previously codified routine development tasks into skills to support coding agents, and the bank extended that approach to non-technical staff and customers to scale repeatable activities.

Frédéric Laurent, deputy chief information officer at Starling Bank, described the tools as “the fruit of all of the customer-facing AI developments we’ve done over the last 18 months” and outlined the progression: starting with spending analysis using large language models, then adding multimodal scam detection, and now organising capabilities into discrete skills that guide the assistant through task steps.

Technical features include reasoning steps encoded into each skill so the assistant can carry out multi-step tasks and multimodal inputs that allow the system to assess images for fraud indicators. Rainy Day Saver and Fraud Control were among the first tools made available in August 2026, with further skills due to be introduced weekly.