Skip to content
Sign in Subscribe
CIO / AI / Financial Services / Starling Bank

Starling trains model on sovereign UK cloud, as CIO warns over concentration risk

CIO Harriet Rees is working with Civo and NVIDIA to create a model trained on 15 billion transactions

Edward Targett
By  Edward Targett
Updated / Published 2 min read
Starling trains model on sovereign UK cloud, as CIO warns over concentration risk
Starling CIO Harriet Rees is driving the work for the bank. Image credit: Starling

Starling says it will be the first UK bank to train an AI model on UK sovereign cloud.

The bank, which has five million customers including 500,000 SMEs, is training a Transactional Foundation Model (TFM) on hardware running in Civo’s cloud. 

The TFM (a model that learns from raw financial transaction histories and payment events to create an intelligence layer for banks and fintechs) is being trained on proprietary Starling data, spanning some 15 billion anonymised transactions, it said.

Starling CIO: I want to reduce concentration risk

Starling’s Group CIO Harriet Rees told The Stack: “I want options that reduce concentration risk on a handful of US-providers; whether that’s more global players outside of the US that run UK operations, or players that are truly sovereign…”

This content is for members only

Subscribe
Add The Stack on Google
  • Edward Targett

    Edward Targett

    Ed is a co-founder of The Stack. He previously edited Computer Business Review. He has also covered energy markets. He started his journalism career on local papers. He left school at 15 and has made a living asking "but why?" ever since.

More in CIO