Starling Bank is leveraging AI in order to help customers spot the warning signs of so-called purchase scams. The digital tool, Scam Intelligence, allows clients to upload images of various items as well as ads from various marketplaces, and analyses them for potential signs of fraudulent activity before serving personalised guidance within a few seconds. According to Starling Bank, it is currently available for personal, joint and business account customers.
It’s reportedly the “first” time a UK bank has provided an AI-powered scam detection tool in its app, and comes after the launch of Starling’s Spending Intelligence tool in June of this year, which is said to have marked Starling as one of first UK bank to put AI in clients’ hands.
While many others financial services providers are now using AI to enhance operations, it is not clear just how effective these tools actually are, given that the nascent tech continues to make glaring mistakes including a significant number of false positives in a wide range of scenarios along with the problem of failing to detect major anomalies from time to time.
Nevertheless, with Scam Intelligence, Starling customers are now better equipped to protect themselves from scams, and also learn more about the warning signs, according to Harriet Rees, CIO at Starling. They added that knowledge is power when it comes to “managing and protecting your money, and they believe AI is giving our customers exactly that.”
As explained in the announcement, Scam Intelligence introduces as fraud cost the UK £1.17 billion in 2024, with authorised push payment (APP) fraud, where customers “unwittingly approve payments to scammers, accounting for £450 million.”
The bank aims for Scam Intelligence to reduce “instances of APP fraud by warning customers against specific indicators of scams and educating them about what to monitor for in future transactions.”
Customers are now able to upload an image to Scam Intelligence, including images of various items, listings as well as messages from sellers that are active on marketplaces.
The tool can also analyse screenshots of texts and messages from potential scammers “that are asking Starling customers to transfer money.”
If a customer is attempting to purchase a bike from Facebook Marketplace, Scam Intelligence might “inform them that the price is too good to be true, the image in the ad isn’t genuine, or the bank account details don’t match the seller’s details.”
As stated in a blog post, Scam Intelligence is engineered using Google’s Gemini models, “running on the secure and scalable Google Cloud platform.”
This enables the digital tool to understand the context of the uploaded images and text, before Starling’s proprietary systems provide a risk assessment.
In line with Starling’s focus on maintaining privacy, customers have to opt in to use Scam Intelligence and use of the tool is not required. The banking challenger claims that all data remains securely within Starling’s Google Cloud environment and is not being used for any kind of training purposes.