Starling’s AI banking tool shows you how much you’re wasting on McDonald’s

Starling Bank, one of the UK’s digital challenger banks, has launched a new AI-powered tool that will answer questions about your spending habits. You can now easily find out how much you’ve spent at Amazon in a particular month, how much money you’ve wasted on fast food outlets over the past year, or how much cash you’ve received over a particular period.

Starling’s AI tool, or enhanced search as the bank calls it, is an opt-in feature that enables a prompt where you can ask questions about your spending habits. The tool, built with Google Gemini, even suggests prompts that are personalized to your spending patterns.

Transactions are listed by retailer and are automatically sorted into more than 50 customizable categories, like bills, transport, and groceries. This makes it easy to see how much you’ve spent at a particular retailer over a period of time, or how much you’ve spent on categories like eating out. I checked to see how much I’ve spent on McDonald’s over the past year, and let’s just say I’m off Big Macs for the foreseeable future.

You’ll be presented with a graph and analytics about your spending habits, along with a breakdown of individual payments to retailers in a particular category. It helps address the problem of having the ability to track your payments to retailers in banking apps, but not being able to easily manipulate that data and really understand your finances.

“We believe that anyone and everyone can be ‘Good with money,’ so we’ve designed this feature so that people can engage with their finances in a way that feels natural to them,” says Harriet Rees, CIO of Starling Bank. “The more you talk or type, the more you’ll learn about your money management.”

Starling is one of a few big digital banks in the UK that have taken a mobile-only approach to try and shake up banking in Britain. Starling now has 4.6 million customer accounts, competing against Monzo’s more than 12 million customers and Revolut’s more than 10 million. All three are still far ahead of traditional banks in digital features, including virtual debit cards, the ability to track spending habits, and real-time transactions.