Zopa rolls out AI agent that can move money, not just chat about it

Zopa has opened up its new AI assistant, called Ask, to all holders of its Biscuit current account, letting customers pay bills, split receipts and manage savings using plain language instead of app menus. The London-based digital bank says the tool is built to take action on a customer's behalf, not just answer questions about their money.

The launch matters because it pushes Zopa beyond the chatbot layer that most banking apps have added over the past two years. Ask is designed to execute transactions directly: send a payment, settle a bill, open a savings pot, all from a typed or spoken request.

What Ask actually does

Customers can send money or request it from someone else simply by asking, and they can photograph a restaurant receipt to split the bill automatically. Uploading a photo of an invoice is enough for Ask to pay it. The same natural-language interface covers everyday account tasks such as checking balances, managing cards, reviewing statements and updating personal details.

A third layer is aimed at planning rather than transacting. Customers can tell Ask to set a savings goal, build a budget, or warn them before they overspend in a category such as takeaways. Zopa built the tool on its own AI platform, using what it calls an agentic architecture, meaning the system is meant to interpret what a customer wants and carry it out rather than hand back a list of options.

Clare Gambardella, Zopa Bank's chief customer officer, said the tool changes what customers expect from their bank.

"Ask Zopa redefines the role of a bank in our customers' lives, from simplifying day to day tasks and money management to actively helping people plan, save and make smarter decisions in real time," Gambardella said.

Numbers behind the rollout

Zopa says customers who already use its AI features report customer satisfaction scores 10% higher than those who do not, and that AI now resolves 65% of customer service queries without a human agent. The company has also been using generative AI internally, including for staff onboarding and training.

Those figures sit alongside a wider set of results Zopa has been keen to highlight. The bank says it now serves more than 2 million customers and has booked three consecutive years of profit, with pre-tax profit of £65m in 2025. Industry judges handed Biscuit a British Bank Awards prize for best app heading into 2026, a win Zopa points to as evidence that its AI push sits on top of a product people already rate highly, rather than papering over a weak app.

Why it is a bigger bet than a chatbot

Zopa is not the first UK bank to wire AI into its app. Several digital challengers and incumbents have added conversational assistants over the past two years, mostly for answering questions or surfacing spending insights. What sets Ask apart, on Zopa's own account, is that it is meant to act: moving money, paying invoices and opening savings products on a customer's instruction rather than simply explaining how to do those things.

That is also where the risk sits. Letting an AI agent initiate payments rather than just describe account information raises the stakes on accuracy and fraud controls, and UK regulators have been watching how banks deploy generative AI in anything touching payments. Zopa has not published details of the safeguards built around Ask's ability to act on financial instructions, and that is likely to be the next question from customers and watchdogs alike.

Zopa's own trajectory gives the launch some credibility it might otherwise lack. The company started in 2005 as the world's first peer-to-peer lending platform, long before it became a licensed bank in 2020, and it has spent the years since building out loans, credit cards, savings products, car finance and Biscuit under chief executive Jaidev Janardana. A profitable balance sheet gives it room to experiment with AI without the same pressure facing loss-making rivals.

The near-term test is simple: whether customers trust an AI agent enough to let it handle real money movement rather than just inform them about it. Zopa's wider push into agentic banking, and how far it extends Ask's abilities next, will show whether this was a one-off feature or the start of a broader rebuild of how the bank talks to its customers.