Lloyds and Nationwide-backed fintech Aveni has launched its domain-specific large language model for financial services, FinLLM.
Developed over six months by Aveni Labs in collaboration with banking partners, FinLLM is designed to meet compliance, safety, and performance standards in line with FCA guidance and the EU AI Act.
Last July, Lloyds Banking Group and Nationwide participated in an £11 million Series A funding round for the Scottish fintech and have actively collaborated with the firm in developing FinLLM.
Ranil Boteju, group chief data and analytics officer at Lloyds, stated, “Aveni’s FinLLM will be a game changer for UK financial services. Recognizing its potential, Lloyds Banking Group invested in Aveni in 2024 and has since co-created FinLLM, testing it on our live AI use cases. The progress and ambition of FinLLM’s roadmap and its integration with the broader Aveni product suite have been impressive. I am eager to see the transformative impact of Aveni FinLLM when deployed at scale across Lloyds Banking Group and the industry.”
Aveni reports that extensive benchmarking shows FinLLM consistently outperforms general-purpose models on financial tasks while maintaining performance on standard benchmarks.
Sri Kanisapakkam, chief data officer at Nationwide, remarked, “Since investing in Aveni and collaborating on FinLLM, we are excited to see its first iteration released. We anticipate the benefits it will bring to both Nationwide and our customers.”
With its core capabilities now established, FinLLM is transitioning from research to real-world applications, addressing areas such as risk and compliance, adviser processes, and operational oversight, along with a broader shift towards specialized AI.
Joseph Twigg, CEO of Aveni, emphasized, “With data transparency, AI safety, and ethics at its core, FinLLM is positioned to play a key role in adopting AI agents in the UK market, presenting an appealing alternative to large US-based language models.”