Starling plans banking model on UK sovereign cloud

Starling Bank is developing what it says will be the first AI banking model trained and hosted on a UK sovereign cloud. Working with Nvidia and UK cloud provider Civo, the bank will train its Transactional Foundation Model (TFM) using more than 15 billion anonymised customer transactions.

The model will underpin a new Starling Intelligence layer supporting the bank’s AI services. Fraud detection will be the initial application, followed by integration into Starling Assistant to enable more personalised interactions, including proactive budgeting guidance. Starling expects to put the TFM into production in early 2027.

Development will use Nvidia’s financial services AI blueprint and Civo’s UK-based cloud infrastructure, which includes Nvidia Hopper GPUs. Starling says the arrangement will provide greater control over customer data while supporting high-performance AI workloads.

The project also supports recommendations in the UK Government’s Financial Services AI Adoption Plan, published in July 2026, to reduce concentration risk by diversifying cloud and AI providers. Starling group chief information officer Harriet Rees, who co-authored the plan, said the bank wants to connect its proprietary tools through a shared intelligence layer trained on customers’ specific needs.