Starling Bank has announced the expansion of its agentic AI assistant, which the bank says can boost productivity and detect scams, to business accounts.

Starling Assistant is freely available within the Starling app. The bank said it can benefit small businesses and fulfil complex banking commands.

These include tax ring fencing, with Starling Assistant capable of calculating figures and setting money aside in response to the prompt “put 20 per cent of last month’s earnings aside for VAT”, as well as assessing invoices for potential scams or fraud.

Starling added that the assistant can answer common compliance questions, such as when users are liable under HMRC’s new Making Tax Digital (MTD) rules. Where relevant, Starling Assistant will also share links to MTD documents on HMRC’s website.

Harriet Rees, group chief information officer at Starling, said: “We know that managing finances can be a major drain on time for small businesses.

“Starling Assistant changes this by automating routine tasks and taking the guesswork out of money management. We’re committed to boosting SME productivity, as Starling’s own research shows that if more small businesses adopted digital financial tools their growth could add £25.3bn to the UK economy.”

Later this year, Starling intends to add functionality to the tool that will let it analyse and extract information from receipts. The bank said businesses will be able to ask Starling Assistant to complete prompts such as “summarise the amount I’ve spent on paint in the last week from receipts”, and be given a personalised response drawn from receipts data.

Starling first rolled out Starling Assistant for personal current account users in March and expanded its fraud detection functionality in June. In August, it said it was the first UK digital bank to introduce a student account, which comes with embedded AI features such as personalised spending tools.

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