UK digital bank Starling is working with AI chipmaker NVIDIA and UK cloud provider Civo to develop a transactional foundation model, as it looks to expand its artificial intelligence capabilities while reducing reliance on global technology providers.
The model will be trained and hosted on Civo’s UK sovereign cloud infrastructure, using more than 15 billion anonymised transactions from Starling. The bank plans to use the technology as the foundation for Starling Intelligence, a unified AI layer designed to support its existing tools and future customer-facing services.
The initiative reflects growing interest among financial institutions in developing AI systems that balance performance and innovation with data sovereignty and operational resilience. By using UK-owned cloud infrastructure, Starling aims to retain greater control over its data environment while diversifying its technology supply chain.
The project also aligns with the UK Government’s Financial Services AI Adoption Plan, published in July 2026. Co-authored by Starling group CIO Harriet Rees, who also serves as a government AI Champion, the plan warns that concentration among a small number of global cloud and AI providers can create risks for the financial system. It encourages firms to broaden their supplier relationships and strengthen resilience.
NVIDIA will provide technical support through its Transaction Foundation Model developer blueprint. The development process will use CUDA-X libraries to accelerate data processing on graphics processing units (GPUs), alongside NeMo AutoModel for model training.
Civo’s infrastructure currently runs NVIDIA Hopper GPUs, with deployments using its Vera Rubin platform planned. The cloud provider says its infrastructure is designed to support demanding AI applications, including real-time reasoning and agentic AI workloads.
Starling expects to deploy the transactional foundation model in early 2027, initially using it to improve its fraud detection systems. The bank then plans to integrate the technology with Starling Assistant, its agentic AI financial assistant, to deliver more tailored support. Potential applications include providing personalised budgeting guidance before customers actively request assistance. The bank says it is the first lender to train a transactional foundation model on infrastructure operated by a UK-owned and UK-headquartered cloud business, with data remaining under UK jurisdiction.
Civo provides sovereign cloud and AI computing services from UK data centres. Its customers include the University of Oxford, Mercedes-Benz and Orbital. For Starling, the partnership offers an alternative to relying exclusively on a small number of international cloud platforms as it scales its AI operations.
Rees said, “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.”
Civo CEO Mark Boost added, “AI will only deliver lasting value for the UK economy if it’s built on secure, resilient, sovereign infrastructure. Starling is leading the financial sector by training and hosting its Transactional Foundation Model on a homegrown cloud. 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.”
NVIDIA global head of banking Aser Blanco also commented, “Banks are at the forefront of turning massive amounts of data into timely, personalised insights while also protecting customers from fraud. By combining NVIDIA’s accelerated computing and software for data processing and model training with Civo’s UK sovereign cloud, Starling can deliver exceptional customer experiences while maintaining control of its customers’ data.”
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