Napier AI, the London-based financial crime compliance RegTech, has been selected for the launch of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Supercharged Sandbox, aimed to support the safe, responsible, and accelerate development of AI solutions in UK financial services.
The FCA Supercharged Sandbox, supported by NVIDIA, NayaOne and leveraging NVIDIA AI Enterprise will enable innovative firms to rapidly test, validate and refine their AI models with access to advanced technical resources and regulator expertise.
Five members of the Napier AI Data Science team, including Chief Data Scientist, Dr Janet Bastiman will join the first cohort. The three-month programme will involve an industry bootcamp and Demo Day event, regular updates on the projects, and a testing report to showcase the final solutions.
As part of the Sandbox, Napier AI will use novel frequency-based AI algorithms on large-scale, synthetic financial data sets to detect money laundering typologies more efficiently than previous rules-based systems.
The project could dramatically improve the industry’s ability to detect and disrupt complex money laundering schemes in real time, closing a critical blind spot. The Napier AI / AML Index - 2025-2026 found that money laundering losses in the UK rose to nearly £150 billion over the past year.
For consumers, this would reduce the risk of financial crime exposure, account freezes and false positives caused by less accurate detection systems. While for firms, it would improve detection accuracy with decreased compute cost, alert laundering activity faster, and potentially reduce regulator fines and reputational damage.
Will Monk at Napier AI, commented: “The effective and ethical deployment of AI systems across financial services is not a challenge the industry can solve alone, requiring cross-collaboration from businesses, regulators and technology providers to put robust risk management frameworks and safe innovation environments in place. Working through the FCA’s Supercharged Sandbox will enable leading AI players to accelerate the development of game-changing AI solutions in a controlled manner, building safe systems that have a transformative impact across both the industry and wider society.”
“When deployed in specialist areas such as financial crime, AI can drive billions in cost savings. The Napier AI / AML Index showed that UK financial institutions could save £2.54 billion annually through AI-driven AML solutions, and the FCA’s Supercharged Sandbox is the perfect platform to streamline this development and deployment to put this cost saving into action.”
This initiative follows the synthetic data partnership Napier AI entered last year with The Alan Turing Institute, the FCA and Plenitude.
A recent EY AI Pulse Survey found that a quarter (26 per cent) of financial services have no or limited controls to ensure that AI systems comply with laws and regulations, with just under a quarter lacking safeguards against unauthorised access or corruption.
Despite significant gaps in governance, the research highlighted that over half of financial services firms are planning on ramping up AI spending over the next 12 months.