Starling Bank is developing what it says will be the first AI banking model to be trained and hosted on a UK sovereign cloud, a move designed to strengthen its AI capabilities while reducing reliance on global cloud providers.
The digital bank said is working with Nvidia and UK cloud provider Civo to build a Transactional Foundation Model (TFM) which will be trained using more than 15 billion anonymised customer transactions.
The model will underpin a new “Starling Intelligence” layer, designed to support the bank’s growing portfolio of AI services, including fraud detection and its agentic AI-powered financial assistant.
TFM will be developed using Nvidia’s financial services AI blueprint, a technology which enables firms to deploy AI systems, and trained on Civo’s UK-based cloud infrastructure, which includes Nvidia Hopper GPUs. Starling said the sovereign cloud deployment will help ensure greater control over customer data while supporting high-performance AI workloads.
Initially, the model will be used to enhance fraud detection before being integrated into Starling Assistant, enabling more personalised customer interactions such as proactive budgeting guidance.
Starling expects to put the TFM into production in early 2027.
Starling said the project also supports recommendations made in the UK Government’s Financial Services AI Adoption Plan, published in July 2026, which highlighted the need for financial institutions to reduce concentration risk by broadening their use of cloud and AI providers. The report was co-authored by Harriet Rees, Starling’s group chief information officer and a UK government AI champion for financial services.
“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,” said Rees.
“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.”
