Edinburgh-based fintech firm Aveni has announced the release of a new domain-specific large language model (LLM), purpose-built for the UK financial services sector.

Developed over six months by the specialist team at Aveni Labs, FinLLM has been designed to meet the industry’s stringent requirements for compliance, safety, and performance, aligning with both FCA guidance and regulations under the EU AI Act.

The creation of FinLLM has been a strategic priority for Aveni, and was the focus of investment made in the business last year by both Lloyds Banking Group and Nationwide. That investment round saw Aveni raise £11 million in one of the largest Series A investments in a Scottish business last year.

Through collaboration with these industry partners, Aveni has worked to make sure that the LLM capabilities are grounded in real-world applications and industry needs, with their input influencing the technical build and Aveni’s approach to governance and risk.

“FinLLM combines the brilliant minds in Aveni Labs, one of the strongest AI Labs in the country, with the AI teams at two of the UK’s leading financial services institutions – Lloyds Banking Group and Nationwide,” said Joseph Twigg, CEO of Aveni.

“The output is a highly performant model, that over coming months will start to deliver automation for a range of use cases in UK Financial Services. 

“With data transparency, AI Safety and Ethics at its heart, FinLLM is also poised to play a key role in the adoption of AI Agents in the UK market, presenting an attractive alternative to large US-based LLMs.”

Aveni said that extensive benchmark testing had shown FinLLM consistently outperforms general-purpose LLMs on financial tasks, while maintaining performance on standard benchmark tasks. 

The Scottish fintech said that the LLM’s results across continual pre-training (CPT) and instruction fine-tuning (SFT) stages reflect the strength of the firm’s data strategy, training process, and evaluation framework – and has delivered a model that’s ethical, compliant, and finely tuned for the needs of the financial services industry.

With its core capabilities now established, FinLLM is set to move from research into real-world deployment, with the next phase focusing on scaling its impact across the UK financial services sector by embedding it within Aveni’s flagship products.

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Aveni said this phase will be driven by a strategic roadmap that includes expanding the FinLLM model suite, integrating proprietary financial datasets, and aligning its capabilities with sector-specific compliance and performance demands. 

“Aveni’s FinLLM will be a game changer for UK financial services,” said Ranil Boteju, group chief data and analytics officer at Lloyds Banking Group.

“Having seen the FinLLM roadmap and integration with the broader Aveni product suite, I’ve been blown away with the progress and ambition. I am excited to see the transformative impact the Aveni FinLLM will have when deployed at scale across Lloyds Banking Group and the industry.”

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