Major UK banks and data giants are stepping up their AI experiments in a closely watched regulatory program, as the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) pushes to make Britain a global leader in safe AI deployment for financial services.
In a speech delivered on Tuesday (21 April) at UK FinTech Week, Jessica Rusu, the FCA’s chief data, information and intelligence officer, highlighted the second cohort of the regulator’s AI Live Testing initiative.
Participants include Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group (via Scottish Widows), Experian, UBS, GoCardless, and several others working on real-world applications ranging from agentic payments to AI in financial advice and credit scoring.
The testing is happening in a supervised “live” environment, allowing established firms to trial AI systems with actual market conditions while under FCA oversight, without full-scale rollout risks.
It’s part of a broader push that is partnered with NVIDIA for compute power and data, and an expanding AI Lab designed to slash development timelines from a year to just three months.
Big names, high-stakes use cases
While the FCA hasn’t released exhaustive details on each firm’s specific projects, consistent with the low-profile nature of early testing, Rusu explicitly referenced work on AI applications in financial advice and credit scores within the cohort that features Barclays, Lloyds/Scottish Widows, and Experian.
Lloyds has already signaled ambitions in AI-driven personalization, with earlier announcements around AI tools for customer money management and expectations of significant value creation from generative AI in 2026.
Experian, the credit reference agency, is a natural fit for AI-enhanced credit insights. The firm has separately partnered with OpenAI to embed UK credit score tools directly into ChatGPT, showing its push toward more accessible, AI-mediated financial data for consumers.
Other cohort members are exploring agentic payments where AI agents act on consumer preferences for transactions, anti-money laundering, and targeted investment support.
The overall goal is to harness “agentic commerce,” where trusted AI handles shopping, switching, and optimising finances within strict guardrails to improve consumer outcomes on price, convenience, and wellbeing, Rusu said.
An earlier AI Live Testing group included firms testing debt resolution, personalised guidance, and customer service automation. Demand is surging and FCA innovation applications rose 49% last year, with AI a key theme alongside open banking and open finance.
Rusu stressed the FCA’s light-touch philosophy and noted that the regulator has no new AI-specific rules for now.
Instead, the group is gathering real-world evidence through these programs and plans to publish examples of good and poor practices later in 2026.
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