By PAUL O’DONOGHUE, Senior Correspondent
STARLING Bank says a new AI agent can investigate transaction-monitoring alerts in under 17 seconds.
The bank says human analysts typically take 15 to 30 minutes to complete the same task.
Starling deployed its first Agentic Financial Crime Investigator three weeks ago, according to Bernadette Smith, its chief customer and banking officer.
“The early data is in—and it completely exceeded expectations: < 17 seconds per alert,” Smith wrote on LinkedIn.
“What typically takes a human analyst 15 to 30 minutes of manual context-switching, flicking between screens, and drafting narratives is now executed flawlessly in seconds.”
Unlike external tools, the agent is embedded directly within Starling’s core banking engine. This gives it access to the bank’s data without relying on third-party plugins or external application programming interfaces (APIs).
“Because it sits inside the core, Starling owns the data and the model, meaning access to real-time telemetry, historical behavior patterns, and transactional contexts,” Smith wrote.
She said this avoids delays from external integrations, along with additional costs and development constraints.
Starling and AI tools for AML transaction monitoring
Smith said: “The future of Financial Crime compliance isn’t bigger analyst teams or faster rule engines—it’s native, AI agents working in milliseconds.”
The deployment forms part of Starling’s broader AI programme, which includes fraud prevention and financial crime investigations.
Earlier this month, the bank announced a partnership with Nvidia and Civo to develop a transactional foundation model. The model will be trained on more than 15 billion anonymised Starling transactions and hosted on Civo’s UK sovereign cloud.
Starling expects the model to enter production in early 2027, initially focusing on fraud detection.
The bank has also introduced a Scam Intelligence agent within its Starling Assistant. The tool uses Google’s Gemini models to help customers identify potential scams.
The deployment follows a £28.9 million fine imposed on Starling by the Financial Conduct Authority in 2024. The penalty covered financial crime control failings between December 2019 and November 2023.
The FCA found that Starling had screened customers against only part of the UK sanctions list until early 2023. It also identified weaknesses in sanctions monitoring and testing.
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