Starling develops AI banking model on UK sovereign cloud

Starling Bank is developing a new artificial intelligence (AI) model with NVIDIA, using UK cloud provider Civo’s infrastructure to train and host the technology entirely within the UK.

The bank says the project will be the first banking transactional foundation model (TFM) trained and hosted on a UK sovereign cloud, supporting its plans to expand AI-powered banking services while reducing reliance on major international cloud providers.

The model will be trained using more than 15 billion anonymised transactions from Starling’s proprietary data, enabling the bank to identify patterns in customer behaviour and develop more personalised financial services.

It will eventually form the basis of a new intelligence layer, known as Starling Intelligence, designed to underpin the bank’s growing range of AI capabilities.

“We’ve made huge strides with our proprietary AI tools, launching the UK’s first agentic AI financial assistant and rolling out new features every week. Now we want to connect these tools with a single intelligence layer that’s trained entirely on the specific needs of our customers.

“We also want to take a leadership role in the development of home-grown cloud infrastructure, which is essential to European companies’ ability to diversify their suppliers and reduce concentration risk.”

The initiative follows recommendations in the UK Government’s Financial Services AI Adoption Plan, published in July 2026 and co-authored by Rees, which highlighted the financial sector’s dependence on a small number of global AI and cloud providers.

The report called for greater diversification of technology partnerships to strengthen operational resilience and reduce concentration risk.

Starling’s model will be developed with NVIDIA’s financial services team, using its Transaction Foundation Model developer blueprint and accelerated computing technology.

Civo will provide the UK-based cloud infrastructure required to train and operate the model, allowing Starling to retain control over its data while supporting the development of domestic cloud capabilities.

“Pairing NVIDIA compute with Civo’s UK sovereign cloud shows that banks don’t have to trade performance or innovation for control of their data, or depend on a handful of global providers.”

Aser Blanco, Global Head of Banking at NVIDIA, added: “Banks are at the forefront of turning massive amounts of data into timely, personalised insights while also protecting customers from fraud.”

Starling expects to put the transactional foundation model into production in early 2027, initially using it to enhance existing fraud detection capabilities.

The technology will subsequently support Starling Assistant, the bank’s agentic AI financial assistant, enabling more personalised services such as proactive budgeting guidance based on customers’ financial activity.