SBS has launched its AI Foundation for core banking, with Scottish Building Society achieving approximately 30% to 40% faster response times from its deployment, SBS says, FinTech Magazine reported on 13 October.
Key points
- SBS says the platform is available to its global base of more than 1,500 financial institutions.
- Scottish Building Society is running the platform in production on Amazon Web Services.
- Banks can deploy it in private cloud, managed cloud or on-premises environments.
- The system uses Nvidia NIM microservices and NeMo Guardrails for AI applications in banking.
Nvidia infrastructure inside SBS banking systems
The platform runs on Nvidia infrastructure and gives banks a choice of private cloud, managed cloud or fully on-premises deployment, Retail Banker International reported on 14 October. SBS has made it available to the financial institutions it serves globally.
Nvidia NIM microservices provide its AI layer. The platform also uses Nvidia NeMo Guardrails to constrain responses to a bank’s regulatory parameters. FinTech Magazine reported that the technology includes open Nemotron models alongside those components within SBS’s banking software.
SBS connects information held in its core banking, lending, digital banking and regulatory reporting systems for use by generative AI applications and autonomous agents. That places the applications alongside records banks already use for customer transactions, credit and compliance work.
Banks face GDPR requirements, local rules on where data resides and their own internal controls. Eric Bierry, SBS’s chief executive, told the publication that the company had built the platform to bring AI to data held in banks’ existing systems.
The deployment choices cover different ways of keeping customer and transaction information within an institution’s controlled environment. Scottish Building Society’s installation runs on Amazon Web Services, while SBS also offers private-cloud and on-premises options to institutions using the platform.
Scottish Building Society runs the platform on AWS
Scottish Building Society, an existing SBS customer in the UK, is running AI Foundation in production on Amazon Web Services. Its live use gives SBS an operational deployment as it offers the platform to other financial institutions, rather than a customer trial alone.
SBS also says the building society is receiving more consistent outputs, with explanations and an audit trail for regulatory purposes. The approximately 30% to 40% improvement SBS reports concerns response times. The company’s account of the deployment identifies those outcomes separately.
For customer engagement, the platform applies generative AI to a bank’s own records and product range during onboarding. SBS says it can identify products suited to individual customers and assist with personalisation, timing and product design. Those functions draw on information already held by the institution.
A natural-language function handles questions involving both structured records and unstructured material. The AI co-pilot turns those queries into information for analysis, according to Retail Banker International. It sits alongside the customer-facing applications rather than replacing the underlying banking systems.
The risk function monitors compliance exposure and generates a regulatory audit trail while retaining risk information in the institution’s controlled environment. These functions give banks applications for customer work, data analysis and risk monitoring within the same platform.
SBS offers AI Foundation across 80 countries
SBS says its global customer base exceeds 1,500 financial institutions. The Paris-headquartered company supplies banking software across 80 countries, including products for core banking, lending, payments and compliance. AI Foundation is being offered through that existing customer network.
Its customers include Santander, Société Générale, BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole, HSBC and Nationwide. The company’s software covers open banking and asset finance as well as its core banking products, giving the new platform several types of banking data to work with.
Bierry told FinTech Magazine that SBS already operates core systems containing the data banks would use for AI applications. The company says its composable software architecture allows institutions to modernise operations without replacing every underlying system at once.
SBS and Nvidia describe Scottish Building Society’s installation as the first operational deployment of Nvidia’s entire AI stack within a core banking system. The installation combines the company’s existing banking software with Nvidia models, microservices and controls in a production environment.
