Starling Bank will let customers set up payments by talking to its app

Starling Bank is launching a "talk to transact" feature that lets customers set up payments by speaking or typing to its app, Finextra reports. Personal and joint account holders will be able to say things like "Pay the plumber £200" or "Send Mum £20 for lunch," and the in-app Starling Assistant sets up the payment for the customer to approve with a tap. The feature runs on the bank's Starling Intelligence agentic AI platform and is due to roll out by the end of the year.

Small business customers will get a similar option, telling the assistant to "Pay this invoice" while uploading a photo of the bill. "Agentic payments are following mobile wallets as the next evolution of payments here in the UK," said Harriet Rees, Starling's group chief information officer. Starling has also been working with NVIDIA on a transaction model trained and hosted in a UK sovereign cloud, and says an agentic financial crime investigator it launched last month can complete an investigation in 17 seconds.