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Starling Bank has introduced “smart tools”, a suite of artificial intelligence (AI) tools that act as skills for the Starling Assistant. The tools are being built based on customer feedback and are designed to help the bank’s customers better manage their money.
Starling’s goal is to launch new smart tools every week, starting with a set of skills to create personalised savings plans, share scam guidance, automate VAT savings and equip businesses for Making Tax Digital.
Speaking to Computer Weekly about the launch of smart tools, Frédéric Laurent, deputy chief information officer at Starling Bank, said: “It represents the fruit of all of the customer-facing AI developments we’ve done over the last 18 months and is essentially the journey which follows what the AI industry at large has been able to develop from a tech point of view.”
As AI technology improves and the industry identifies how to use it, Laurent said Starling Bank has tried to make sure those technological advancements benefit both the bank and its customers.
“We started with spending, which was natural language processing based on LLMs [large language models],” he said. “Then the AI companies added multi-modal capabilities, so we created scam intelligence, which can take a picture and decide whether there are some red flags relating to fraud.”
The bank took on board reasoning capabilities when it created the Starling Assistant. “Now the industry seems to have coalesced around that concept of skills, which is a way of telling an AI model how to perform a task through a succession of steps that you’ve essentially encoded,” added Laurent.
The idea of AI encapsulating a skill is something the bank has taken on in its internal software development processes. Laurent said the smart tools project was actually inspired by the way in-house software development has used AI. “In order for our software engineers to get the most out of coding agents, we realised it would be useful to codify our understanding of our code bases into skills,” he said.
These skills represent certain activities the software engineers at Starling Bank need to do almost every day. Codifying these daily tasks means they can be scaled up, said Laurent.
“We’ve deployed AI for the benefit of our engineers; we’ve deployed AI for the benefit of our non-tech staff; and we’ve deployed AI for the benefit of our customers,” he said. “Every time there’s something that seems to work in one area, in my role, I try with my teams to think about where else it can be applied.”
Smart tools are surfaced through Starling Assistant, which responds to natural language and voice prompts, providing a conversational interface through which customers can carry out their day-to-day banking.
Other smart tools due to be made available in August include Rainy Day Saver and the Fraud Control skill. The Rainy Day Saver tool automatically analyses customers’ income, direct debits and spending patterns to help the bank’s customers determine how much they can realistically save, before setting up transfers into a dedicated savings.
Starling Bank said the Fraud Control skill enables its customers to turn on the right protection controls for their needs. These include Starling’s Snatch-Theft Detector, Call Status Indicator and Scam Intelligence tools.
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