Aveni Labs: building the future of AI in financial services
The thinking behind Aveni Labs
Dr Barry Haddow, Head of Aveni Labs, came to Aveni from machine translation research at the University of Edinburgh, where he spent years measuring how AI systems perform once real people use them. In this conversation he makes the case for small models built for one industry, and explains what that gives the financial services firms using them.
Built for control, performance & scale
Control and sovereignty
Full control over data, models and deployment, aligned to firm and regulatory requirements.Performance, by design
The right model for every task, combining finance-specific and frontier models for real-world accuracy.Cost without compromise
Optimised model usage to balance performance and cost at scale.Everything Labs builds has a path into production
FinLLM
Our flagship research programme, FinLLM is Aveni’s finance-specific model suite, designed for accuracy, compliance and real-world reasoning. Built from the ground up for financial services, it powers key decisions across the platform.AveniBench
Our evaluation framework that tests every model against real financial tasks before deployment, ensuring accuracy, reliability and performance under regulatory scrutiny.Applied research
On hallucinations, bias, retrieval, multilingual reasoning and model reliability. Published in the open and fed back into the platform – so every model our customers run benefits from the latest findings.FinLLM: the LLM suite built for UK financial services.
FinLLM is Aveni Labs’ industry-aligned LLM suite for UK financial services. It’s engineered to be transparent, accurate, fair and tailored to the industry – the four things generic LLMs aren’t.
Learn more about FinLLMEnhanced transparency
Complete clarity into training data, hierarchy and lineage. Outputs can be traced and verified, meeting and exceeding FCA and AI regulatory standards.Reduced hallucinations
Targeted reinforcement learning and high-quality financial domain data significantly improve reliability and accuracy on decisions that matter.Mitigated bias
Developed with explicit ethical guidelines and human feedback, minimising the biases generic LLMs carry from broad internet data.Tailored financial solutions
Trained on UK financial services data, enhanced with advanced synthetic data, and built for regulatory alignment and real-world personalisation from day one.
Aveni’s FinLLM will be a game changer for UK financial services. Recognising its potential, Lloyds Banking Group invested in Aveni in 2024, and since then have worked closely with Aveni to co-create FinLLM and test it on our live AI use cases. 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.
The minds behind the models
World-class expertise built into everything we do.
To push the boundaries of AI innovation by creating vertically-aligned large language models and pioneering new technologies that redefine AI in financial services – setting new benchmarks for security, ethics and performance.
Collaborate with Labs.
Work with Aveni’s research unit on the problems our industry partners are solving next – from finance-specific foundation models to evaluation, reliability and the agentic workflows regulated institutions can actually deploy.