UK plan targets wider AI use in financial services

HM Treasury’s Financial Services AI Adoption Plan calls for UK finance firms to move beyond isolated pilots and integrate AI across core operations while maintaining trust and financial resilience. The plan says 21% of firms in the financial and real estate sectors had already adopted AI, above the 16% seen across the economy as a whole, while FCA and Bank of England survey findings put adoption among surveyed financial firms at around 75%.

Regulatory clarity is presented as the most immediate priority. Firms support the UK’s principles-based, outcomes-focused regime, but want easier access to guidance, sandboxes and joined-up regulator support. The plan also highlights a financial advice gap, with regulated advice currently reaching only around 9% of UK adults, while 1 in 5 UK adults are already open to AI making decisions for them and around 26% trust general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for financial advice.

Recommended actions include a review of advice-like outputs from general purpose large language models, consistent consumer disclosures for AI-enabled guidance, faster assessment of critical AI and cloud providers, voluntary incident sharing, and a third-party assurance framework. The plan also urges investment in AI skills, visa changes to attract global specialists, and a trust framework for agentic payments covering liability, identity and authentication.