HM Treasury AI Champions unveil financial services AI roadmap

HM Treasury’s AI Champions for financial services have unveiled a new roadmap designed to accelerate the safe adoption of artificial intelligence across the UK financial sector, with recommendations aimed at boosting innovation, strengthening resilience and cementing the UK’s position as a global leader in AI-enabled financial services.

The Financial Services AI Adoption Plan, developed by Harriet Rees, Group Chief Information Officer at Starling, and Dr Rohit Dhawan, Head of AI and Advanced Analytics at Lloyds Banking Group, follows extensive engagement with industry, government and regulators.

The plan outlines a series of recommendations intended to help firms adopt AI safely and at scale, improving outcomes for consumers and businesses while supporting the UK’s wider economic growth ambitions.

Among its key proposals are measures to improve regulatory clarity and accessibility, ensuring firms can deploy AI with greater confidence while maintaining appropriate consumer protections. The report also calls for regulation to evolve alongside advances in AI-powered financial guidance and advice, allowing innovation to flourish without compromising customer safeguards.

The AI Champions also recommend strengthening operational resilience through an industry-led third-party AI assurance scheme, supported by enhanced incident-sharing arrangements and faster implementation of the Critical Third Party (CTP) regime.

Recognising that AI adoption depends as much on people as technology, the report highlights the need to develop future skills and workforce capabilities across the financial services sector. It also proposes establishing a trust framework to enable the safe adoption of agentic payments, helping position the UK at the forefront of next-generation financial services.

Beyond financial services, the plan urges government to strengthen the UK’s sovereign AI capabilities, improve national resilience and encourage greater cross-sector collaboration to enhance long-term competitiveness.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves welcomed the publication, describing AI as central to the UK’s economic future.

“AI is the defining technology of our generation, critical to our national security and to our economic future. The role of the active and strategic state is not to step back from the challenges, but to step up,” she said.

“In my Mais lecture I set out a serious plan for AI sovereignty, backing British companies to compete and win, and the AI Adoption Plan is central to achieving this across the financial services sector and establishing the UK as the fastest adopter of AI in the G7.”

“Throughout my engagement with industry as AI Champion, the message I received was clear. Financial services firms are motivated to adopt AI at scale and to take a world-leading position,” she said.

“There’s broad agreement that we have the regulatory foundations to do this safely and that we now need to move forward with greater clarity, focus and ambition.”

Rees added that firms need a better balance between AI-based services delivered by regulated institutions and those operating outside the regulatory perimeter, ensuring consumers benefit from trusted financial expertise while enabling innovation.

She also highlighted agentic payments as an area where the UK could establish global leadership.

“We need to focus our ambition to take leading positions in specific areas such as agentic payments, where we have the capability and the digitised customer base we need to solve today’s problems with tomorrow’s technology.”

“The UK has a world-leading financial services sector and thriving technology ecosystem, giving us a unique opportunity to harness AI to drive economic growth and improve outcomes for consumers and businesses,” he said.

“These recommendations are designed to accelerate the safe adoption of AI across financial services by providing greater clarity, building trust and strengthening the foundations needed for firms to innovate at scale.”

Harriet Rees and Dr Rohit Dhawan were appointed by HM Treasury as Financial Services AI Champions in January 2026.

The publication comes as financial institutions continue to expand the use of AI across customer service, operations, fraud prevention and risk management, with the technology increasingly viewed as a key driver of productivity, resilience and customer experience across the sector.