Starling is launching a feature called 'talk to transact' that lets personal and joint account holders set up payments by speaking or typing natural language prompts in its app, Finextra reports. Examples include "Pay the plumber £200" or "Send Mum £20 for lunch." The in-app Starling Assistant then prepares the payment, and the customer approves it with a screen tap. The feature runs on the bank's Starling Intelligence agentic AI platform and is set to roll out by the end of the year.
Small business customers will get a similar feature that lets them tell the assistant to "Pay this invoice" while uploading an image of the bill, according to Finextra.
"Agentic payments are following mobile wallets as the next evolution of payments here in the UK," said Group CIO Harriet Rees, who co-authored the UK government's recent financial services AI adoption plan. Finextra notes Starling recently began working with Nvidia on a transactional foundational model trained and hosted in a UK sovereign cloud, and last month said an agentic financial crime investigator can complete an end-to-end investigation within 17 seconds.