Sovereign AI platform launches for banks
Among this week’s fintech highlights, SBS AI Foundation, a sovereign AI platform developed with NVIDIA, has launched. It enables banks to utilize generative and agentic AI while keeping customer and transaction data within their own systems, ensuring data security and compliance.
The SBS AI Foundation is already live with Scottish Building Society on AWS and is available to SBS’ global base of more than 1,500 financial institutions. This launch addresses a persistent banking constraint: AI often performs best when models can access broad operational data.
Sovereign AI in Banking
However, banks must comply with GDPR, local data-residency rules, and internal controls. SBS’ answer is to bring the AI runtime to the data, rather than move sensitive records into an external model environment.
This approach enables banks to leverage AI while maintaining control over their data. The SBS AI Foundation provides a secure and compliant way for banks to utilize AI, which is essential for their operations.
Autonomous Banking
Monu Kurien Mathews, who leads HCLTech’s Business Solutions for Financial Services unit, believes that the next phase will be ‘autonomous banking’: AI embedded across customer engagement, operations, engineering, and governance. He argues that generic AI is not enough for financial services and that domain-specific AI can make the biggest difference.
According to Mathews, the banks that pull ahead will be those that redesign how they operate around AI – not simply add copilots to existing processes. This requires a fundamental transformation of their operations and governance structures.
Starling has announced the development of a transactional foundation model (TFM) in partnership with NVIDIA and UK-based cloud infrastructure provider Civo. The model will be trained on proprietary Starling data from more than 15 billion anonymised transactions.
AI in Corporate Travel
Mesh Payments and KAYAK for Business are trying to close the corporate travel gap with their new strategic partnership. The integrated offering connects KAYAK’s corporate travel booking experience with Mesh’s global virtual cards, spend controls, and AI-led expense automation.
This partnership aims to provide a single view of a trip from approval to reconciliation, making it easier for finance teams to manage corporate travel expenses. The integrated offering is scheduled to be available by December 2026.
Experian’s Gaurav Arora believes that AI agents need trust to scale in fintech. As Head of Gen AI & Automation, Credit & Verification Services at Experian UK&I, he leads the team behind ProductMate, the company’s internal agentic AI platform.
For Arora, the goal is to make AI useful beyond the people writing code. Product managers, testers, service engineers, and governance teams all need access to an “AI colleague”; but only if it is built on trusted data, transparent decision-making, and clear human accountability.
