The news: Starling Bank has launched an AI assistant, built on Google’s Gemini, for UK retail customers. It can respond to written and voice prompts and perform tasks like setting up savings goals and budgets, generating quizzes about customers’ spending patterns, and answering questions in natural language. The chatbot will soon also be available to business account holders.

Trendspotting: Lloyds has an agentic AI financial assistant planned for its mobile app, which the bank expects to go live this year. Its purported value is to allow customers to ask questions about their spending, generate insights that inform financial planning, and get education on financial concepts—similar to Starling’s bot. Indeed, Lloyds also partnered with Google for its chatbot.

Zoom out: Enterprise AI partnerships are accelerating across financial services. Anthropic is expanding Claude’s enterprise capabilities through plug-ins with partners like LSEG and S&P Global, while Goldman Sachs is working with Anthropic on internal AI agents. And BNY is integrating Gemini into its in-house AI platform to power research tools that draw from its extensive data library.

Implications for banks: The crucial issues for genAI-enabled virtual assistants are whether they will work better than what’s already on the market and if customers will use them (or use them because they are more sophisticated than legacy virtual assistants).

The technology behind virtual assistants has evolved only incrementally since Bank of America launched the prototypical modern virtual assistant in 2018, which customers used billions of times in total in 2025. GenAI-powered virtual banking assistants will matter to the industry as a whole—if they create greater customer engagement. If not, they are expensive accessories that change virtually nothing for banks that have already built or bought chatbots to handle customers’ most frequent and frustrating tasks.