UK's new Nvidia-powered sandbox to give banks an AI edge
The sandbox is open to firms in the early stages of experimenting with AI.
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is collaborating with tech giant Nvidia to enable financial service providers in the country to experiment and innovate using artificial intelligence.
The Supercharged Sandbox is open to firms that are in the early stages of experimenting with AI. The FCA hopes to give the financial sector a boost by providing UK banks access to Nvidia’s accelerated computing and its AI enterprise software.
The upgraded sandbox, in collaboration with Nvidia, builds on the UK’s existing Digital Sandbox infrastructure by fintech provider NayaOne. Successful applicants to the programme will be allowed to use the new sandbox from October, the regulator said.
“This collaboration will help those that want to test AI ideas but who lack the capabilities to do so,” said Jessica Rusu, the FCA’s chief data, intelligence and information officer.
“We’ll help firms harness AI to benefit our markets and consumers, while supporting economic growth.’
Nvidia’s head of financial technology for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region Dr Jochen Papenbrock said that AI is fundamentally reshaping the financial sector.
An AI-led transformation in automation, data analysis and decision-making leads to “greater efficiency, accuracy and risk management across a wide range of financial activities”, he said.
The tech’s potential in finance has been long known, with a report from last year suggesting that fintechs are set to see a positive impact in the near term from generative AI.
While the new sandbox is generally seen as a positive development, some experts point out that an external collaboration might not secure long-term resilience in AI for the UK.
“Building long-term resilience in the UK means looking carefully at our reliance on external compute,” said Mark Boost, the CEO of UK-based cybersecurity firm Civo.
“As the AI stack becomes more strategic, the UK should be complementing global partnerships with greater investment in local infrastructure, open standards and technologies we can help shape.”
Late last year, four US tech firms – CyrusOne, ServiceNow, Cloud HQ and CoreWeave – announced investments to a total of £6.3bn to build data centre infrastructure in the UK.
