FinTech LIVE: Interview with Jason Maude, Starling Bank

December 06, 2024

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Jason Maude, Chief Technology Advocate at Starling Bank, at FinTech LIVE London Global Summit 2024

FinTech Magazine recaps its exclusive interview with Jason Maude, Chief Technology Advocate at Starling Bank, from FinTech LIVE London Global Summit

On 22 and 23 October 2024, FinTech LIVE London Global Summit took place at 155 Bishopsgate - an engaging hybrid conference that explored the future trajectory of our fintech industry.

Across both days, attendees had the opportunity to engage with a range of keynote presentations and panel discussions that delved into some of the most prominent points of discussion in our industry, such as fraud & ID verification, sustainability and AI.

Dedicated to inspiring and enhancing connections between the leading C/V/D level fintech executives, FinTech LIVE London provided a unique platform for innovators and leaders to showcase their latest advancements and transform conversations into meaningful partnerships.

Here, we recap our exclusive FinTech LIVE London interview with Jason Maude, Chief Technology Advocate at Starling Bank.

From Starling Bank’s perspective, what does a good AI model look like?

“First up, know why you're using AI. Why are you not doing something simple?

“AI is very complex and you need to be sure that you are correct in deploying an AI-based solution.

“Second up, you need to have very good data. You need to have very good data engineers who can make sure that your data is correctly cleaned and that you know where the golden source of any particular data is so it is then correctly sampled in order to train and test your models.

“Because, even if you bring in a model from the outside, generally speaking, it will be trained and tested on your data. So, you'll need to know that that is being done correctly.

“And third, you need to monitor these models because you might be able to train a model so that it works right now, but is it going to keep working?

“These AI models can degrade far faster than you may expect so you need to make sure that you are on the right track still and have that good monitoring so that if things start to degrade, you can retrain and retest.”

How does Starling Bank use AI in its projects and processes?

“We use AI only a lot internally.

“We don't really have any external customer-facing use cases for it, but internally we use it for all sorts of things like transaction monitoring and things like that.

“We also use it in terms of assessing and summarising customer conversation so that we can make sure that we have correctly captured the essence of what customers are saying to us and make sure that we have identified any problems they have highlighted so that we can serve them best.”

In your opinion, what does the future of AI look like?

“There are some technologies that are hyped up a lot that end up not producing any results or having much of an impact - I don't think AI is one of those.

“I think AI is going to transform a lot of things - the way we work, the internal processes of many financial companies.

“I think it's going to take a bit of time, but then we will start treating AI in the same way that we treat cloud, where we know what the good use cases are and we know how to interact with it to make the best use of the tool.

“We'll gradually start to understand the risks of it a bit better and understand how to mitigate those risks and control them correctly - that's when it starts to power financial services as a day-to-day concern.”

Jason Maude explore the key principles for implementing AI at FinTech LIVE London 2024