1092. News: Finally, the robots take over: Starling gets smarter, Stripe buys OpenRouter, and Visa and Mastercard unite on agentic payments

**Laura Watkins** (0:05)
This is Fintech Insider News. This week, Starling to release weekly smart tools that supercharge money management.
Stripe agrees $7 billion takeover of AI firm OpenRita, and Visa and MasterCard back new agentic payments alliance. We'll be tackling all of this and more on today's new show, so don't go anywhere.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:29)
Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard?

**Laura Watkins** (0:31)
But not the pipeline.

**David Sullivan** (0:33)
That's bull spend, and marketers are calling it out in.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:36)
Dashboard, Confessions. My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had, Impressions.

**Laura Watkins** (0:46)
Cut the bull spend.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:47)
See revenue, not just reach.

**David Sullivan** (0:48)
LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:52)
Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit.

**Laura Watkins** (0:56)
Go to linkedin.com/campaign, turn sick editions apply.
Hello, and welcome to episode 1092 of Fintech Insider News, brought to you by 11FS, the sixth time Consultancy of the Year that works with financial providers, big and small, to build the next generation of financial services. I'm Laura Watkins, Director of Media and Marketing here at 11FS. And to help me unpack the biggest and most interesting stories from Fintech and financial services from the past week, I'm joined by a brilliant panel of guests. First up, we have a welcome back to the podcast for David Sullivan, Data Director at Starling. Welcome back. Please can you remind our listeners a little bit about yourself and your role at Starling?

**David Sullivan** (1:46)
Sure. Thanks, Lauren. Thank you for having me back. It's great to be back.
So I'm David. I head up all of Starling's foundational AI work and our customer-facing AI features, and specifically the Starling Assistant, which is what I'm here to talk about today. So yeah, good to be back.

**Laura Watkins** (2:02)
Absolutely. Great to have you with us. And yeah, as you say, we will be digging into that very shortly.
We have a first time welcome to the show for Stefano Pasquale, Head of Financial Services at Domin. Welcome to the show. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role, please?

**Stefano Pasquali** (2:18)
Nice to meet you and thank you for having me here. I lead in the software part of Domin, specifically in financial vertical, government, defense and manufacturing. And I am like David, the physicist, born with the data science, and many years ago. And we are focusing on sovereignty in AI application.

**Laura Watkins** (2:40)
Fantastic. Well, highly relevant to what we're going to be discussing today. So thank you so much for joining us.
And last but not least, we have a welcome back to the show for Aditi Subrao, Financial Services at Snowflake. Welcome back. Please give us a little bit more of an introduction to yourself and Snowflake.

**Aditi Subbarao** (2:58)
Thank you, Laura. And it's always great to be back. I think especially with Stefano and David, it's going to be fun today.
I am part of Snowflake's Financial Services business. Snowflake is the AI data cloud where we help organizations of all various sizes use all of their data from across sources, types, clouds, regions, to aggregate, analyze, and then activate that data so that enterprises can actually adopt and scale AI in a secure and governed manner. That's what I've been up to with many different financial services customers over the last few months, and looking forward to talking about some of that today.

**Laura Watkins** (3:39)
Brilliant. Thank you. So yes, I have a fantastic panel of guests all with highly relevant skills to help me unpack today's stories. So let's get started with our first one, which is that Starling to release weekly smart tools that supercharge money management. Starling has launched a new suite of AI-powered smart tools within Starling Assistant, with plans to release additional tools every week. Starling Assistant is the bank's agentic AI financial assistant, allowing customers to use natural language and voice prompts to carry out banking tasks including setting up transfers, creating spaces, and analyzing spending. The first smart tools include a tax saver for SMEs, a making tax digital guide, and a spending quiz designed to help customers better understand their spending habits.
Starling is also inviting its 5 million retail and SME customers to suggest new smart tools for its AI team to develop. The bank says the tools available at launch were requested by customers. In the future, Starling plans to allow customers to create their own smart tools using its open APIs enabling more personalized versions of Starling Assistant. So naturally, David, I'm going to come to you first on this one.