Starling Bank is developing a new AI foundation model trained on more than 15 billion anonymised transactions, with plans to use the technology to improve fraud detection and deliver more personalised banking services.
The digital bank is working with NVIDIA and UK cloud provider Civo to develop a Transactional Foundation Model (TFM), which it says will be the first banking AI model trained and hosted entirely within a UK sovereign cloud.
The initiative will see Starling use its proprietary transaction data to identify patterns in customer behaviour and develop a central intelligence layer, known as Starling Intelligence, to support its wider AI capabilities.
The bank intends to introduce the model into production in early 2027, initially focusing on improving its existing AI-powered fraud detection services.
It will subsequently support Starling Assistant, the bank’s agentic AI financial assistant, enabling more personalised services, including proactive budgeting guidance.
The development highlights the growing potential of transaction-specific AI models to identify suspicious activity and support more sophisticated financial crime prevention.
The project also addresses concerns about operational resilience and the financial services industry’s reliance on a relatively small number of global cloud and AI providers.
Harriet Rees, Group CIO at Starling and a UK Government AI Champion for Financial Services, said the bank wanted to connect its existing AI tools through a single intelligence layer trained around its customers’ needs.
She also highlighted the importance of developing domestic cloud infrastructure to help financial institutions diversify suppliers and reduce concentration risk.
The initiative follows recommendations in the UK Government’s Financial Services AI Adoption Plan, published in July 2026, which identified supplier concentration as a potential risk to financial sector resilience.
Starling’s model will use NVIDIA’s financial services technology, including GPU-accelerated data processing and AI model training tools, hosted on Civo’s UK infrastructure.
Aser Blanco, Global Head of Banking at NVIDIA, said the collaboration would help Starling turn transaction data into personalised insights while protecting customers from fraud.
The announcement reflects increasing interest in specialised AI models that can support fraud prevention, customer intelligence and operational resilience while maintaining greater control over sensitive financial data.
