UK digital bank Zopa has launched a five-year campaign to reskill 100,000 banking workers in AI disciplines by 2030.
The campaign will start by offering modules in AI disciplines for fintech workers, specifically engineers, analysts, and operations leads. A dedicated GenAI Engineering Programme will later support deeper technical upskilling, alongside the creation of the Zopa Coding Academy. The first training modules will be released internally to Zopa employees for testing and feedback before being rolled out more broadly.
The move follows the rollout of 1,000 enterprise-grade ChatGTP licences paired with OpenAI-led training for all staff on prompt writing, engineering best practices, and building custom GPTs tailored for internal use.
The latest custom GTPs off the production line include modules to handle customer queries and detect vulnerabilities, and the deployment of autonomous coding agents that streamline development processes. A forthcoming AI Voice Assistant will be introduced to converse with customers and answer queries.
Zopa's investment in AI comes as the bank releases a report on AI adoption in UK banking, forecasting that the sector is poised to invest over £1.8 billion in GenAI by 2030 to increase staff productivity, cut costs, and improve user experience.
As a result of productivity gains, in the next five years Zopa expects some 187 million hours of labour to be saved by GenAI deployments, with the majority of efficiencies coming from back office and administrative tasks in operations and compliance.
Zopa believes high street incumbents with large networks of retail branches and legacy IT systems requiring substantial manual leverage will generate a !00% return on their investment in the first GenAI cycle.
The push into the modern tech will put some 27,000 roles at risk - representing ten per cent of the UK banking sector’s workforce.
Peter Donlon, chief technology officer at Zopa Bank comments: “GenAI marks a paradigm shift in applied computing. Its influence on productivity, software creation, and decision-making systems could rival the advent of the Internet or cloud computing. At Zopa, we’ve been operationalising machine learning for over a decade, well before LLMs became mainstream. That depth of experience has shaped our belief that GenAI isn’t a feature add-on, but a foundational capability. For Zopa technologists, it’s a rare chance to build entirely new intelligence layers, at a level that will redefine the industry.”