The UK could build a state-owned chatbot for your money

The most radical idea in the FCA’s big AI review is not about regulating chatbots, but getting the UK to build its own.

Tucked into the final priority recommendation of the Mills Review, the 147-page study of AI and retail financial services published on Monday (6 July), is a proposal that the FCA should convene the development of a free, inclusively designed, “public-interest, or sovereign-style” AI-enabled financial capability service.

This service would act as a trusted chatbot for the nation’s money, would be free to use, and would be built in partnership with the government, the Money and Pensions Service, consumer bodies and industry.

The Review found that AI is becoming a primary way consumers access financial information, compare options and make decisions. As a result, access to high-quality support “should not depend solely on consumers’ ability to pay for the most capable AI models or services”.

If the best financial advice in Britain ends up behind a monthly subscription, then good financial outcomes become a premium feature, and the people who most need help get the substandard free tier.

This is already happening to some degree. The Review’s own survey found that 11% of AI users already pay for access outside of work, and it noted that providers charge more for better capability.

It warns of a two-tier market in which consumers with more capable AI receive better answers, better comparisons and better ongoing management of their finances, while everyone else gets poorer information and more friction.

Should frontier capability concentrate within paid services, or services with embedded commercial interests, the Review warned, “unequal access and conflicts of interest may emerge”.

A massive endeavour

The data shows only 9% of UK consumers use traditional financial advice. Just 30% hold life or income protection. Around 900,000 people remain unbanked, and roughly £300 billion sits in low-interest savings accounts earning next to nothing.

These are gaps which decades of policy have already failed to close, and that Review Chair Sheldon Mills argued AI represents “a once-in-a-generation chance” to fix.

The Review found 26% of people already believe general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT provide reliable financial advice, despite limited awareness that formal routes to recourse do not apply.

Without a trusted, high-quality alternative, it warned, consumers will either disengage from AI-enabled finance entirely or rely on unverified services, with both roads leading to worse outcomes.

A sovereign entity

The Review is clear that this should be a ‘sovereign’ entity. In doing so, it positions impartial financial guidance as public infrastructure that is closer to NHS 111 than to a comparison site.

However, the Review is also careful about the potential limits of such a service.

Delivery should come through broad-based partnership rather than the FCA building models in-house, and the objective, it stressed, “is not to remove accountability from consumers” but to ensure decisions are shaped by accurate and impartial information rather than “inaccurate, conflicted or inaccessible sources”.

Like the rest of the report, this now rests with the FCA Board and Executive to take forward, or not.

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