Leading UK building society backs initial investment in Aveni’s FinLLM to become first commercial adopter
Edinburgh, 16 June 2026 – Aveni, a leading UK AI fintech, today announced that Nationwide Building Society has become the first organisation to deploy FinLLM in a live environment, outside of Aveni’s core product suite. Nationwide is the UK’s largest building society and is currently testing Aveni’s FinLLM across a range of financial services compliance use cases, with plans to leverage the technology across various applications once testing is complete.
Developed over twelve months by the specialist team at Aveni Labs, FinLLM is a financial services specific large language model family designed to meet the financial industry’s stringent requirements for compliance, safety, and performance.
Nationwide’s position as first commercial adopter is the natural progression of a deeper partnership: the building society has been an investor in Aveni since 2024 and played an active role in co-creating the model, helping shape both its technical build and Aveni’s approach to governance and risk. Its decision to deploy FinLLM in production underscores its confidence in the technology and its commitment to responsible AI adoption.
Currently used within Aveni’s Assist and Detect products FinLLM integrates structured and unstructured data, adheres to ethical AI principles, and is governed by rigorous oversight, all aligned with FCA guidance and the EU AI Act. Extensive benchmarking demonstrates that FinLLM consistently outperforms general-purpose LLMs on financial tasks, setting a new benchmark for responsible generative AI in one of the world’s most regulated industries.
Sri Kanisapakkam, Chief Data Officer at Nationwide, said: “Since investing in Aveni and working together on co-creating FinLLM, we are delighted to see how it has developed, and even more so to be the first organisation to deploy it. The industry-specific family of models approach that Aveni has taken is exactly what we need: the flexibility to apply the right model for the right task, at scale. We’re excited by the early performance we are seeing during testing and the potential benefits FinLLM will bring both Nationwide and our customers, as we continually look to deliver better service and experience through the responsible adoption of new technologies.”
Joseph Twigg, CEO of Aveni, commented:“Nationwide’s decision to be both an investor in and the first commercial customer of FinLLM is a powerful endorsement of what we have built. Their early engagement has been instrumental in shaping a model that truly reflects the needs of a major UK financial institution. The family of models approach we have taken means In an era where AI sovereignty is becoming increasingly important, FinLLM is a fantastic example of UK AI innovation, a highly performant model, with data transparency, AI safety and ethics at its heart, that will start to deliver real automation for a range of use cases across UK financial services.”
Unlike general-purpose models that approximate regulatory context, FinLLM models are trained on the specific rules, workflows, and supervisory expectations that apply to regulated firms. The family of models approach allows organisations to select and deploy the right model for each use case and scale across their business as needs evolve. Every model is optimised for its specific use case — from agent assurance to compliance detection — and gets sharper with every deployment.
ENDS
Notes to editors
For more information please contact Kate Forster, Head of Communications: kate.forster@aveni.ai.
About Aveni
Aveni is the AI platform purpose-built for regulated financial services. Its Act • Administer • Assure operating model enables firms to deploy AI guidance agents for customers, copilots for teams, and unified assurance. Its products Aveni Assist, an AI productivity solution for advisers and operations teams, and Aveni Detect, its AI compliance monitoring tool, are already deployed across the UK’s leading banks, wealth managers and financial advisers. All powered by Aveni’s proprietary suite of financial services AI models, including FinLLM, the UK’s first large language model built specifically for financial services, alongside the Aveni Compliance Knowledge Hub, a machine-readable regulatory intelligence layer built from millions of real interactions.
Active across some of the UK’s largest financial institutions, Aveni creates sovereign, compounding IP rather than commodity infrastructure. Founded in 2018, Aveni originated as a University of Edinburgh start up venture. Lexi Birch, co-founder and Chief Scientist at Aveni is a Professor in Natural Language Processing in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.
www.aveni.ai
About Nationwide Building Society
Nationwide is the world’s largest building society, with over 16 million members. Following its acquisition of Virgin Money UK PLC, Nationwide is connected with one in three people in the UK and is the second largest provider of mortgages and retail deposits. It is also a major provider of current accounts, credit cards, personal loans and business banking. Customers can choose to manage their finances in a branch, via mobile app, the internet, telephone, and post. Nationwide has around 25,000 employees and its head office is in Swindon, UK.
As a financial services provider owned by its members, not shareholders, Nationwide’s purpose is: Banking – but fairer, more rewarding, and for the good of society. For more information see About Us | Nationwide.
