Nvidia and FCA Invite Companies to Play in AI ‘Sandbox’

Nvidia has teamed with the U.K.’s financial watchdog to help companies explore artificial intelligence (AI).

The collaboration, dubbed the “Supercharged Sandbox,” lets financial services companies experiment with AI using Nvidia computing and software, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) announced in a news release Monday (June 9).

“This collaboration will help those that want to test AI ideas but who lack the capabilities to do so,” Jessica Rusu, the FCA’s chief data, intelligence and information officer, said in the release. “We’ll help firms harness AI to benefit our markets and consumers, while supporting economic growth.”

According to the release, the sandbox is designed to offer companies access to improved data, technical expertise and regulatory support to speed up innovation, and is open to any financial services firm that wants to experiment with AI.

“AI is fundamentally reshaping the financial sector by automating processes, enhancing data analysis, and improving decision-making, which leads to greater efficiency, accuracy, and risk management across a wide range of financial activities,” said Dr. Jochen Papenbrock, EMEA head of financial technology at Nvidia.

“The FCA’s Supercharged Sandbox provides firms with a secure environment to explore AI innovations using NVIDIA’s full stack accelerated computing platform, supporting industry-wide growth and efficiency.”

PYMNTS examined the use of AI in the finance world earlier this year in a conversation with John Kain, head of financial services market development at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“AI has been such an integral part of how the industry has modernized over the last decade. It really is in every part of the financial services value chain,” said Kain, a former JPMorgan executive. “What’s dramatically changed in the last two years is the impact of generative AI on all those processes.”

In other news from the intersection of AI and financial services, PYMNTS spoke with John Bresnahan, global head of operations at i2c, in an interview posted Monday about that company’s use of the technology for payments and banking functions.

“We’ve been building our AI capabilities for over a decade now,” he said. “This isn’t a new phrase for us. We really think of AI as augmented intelligence. We don’t view it as something that takes over human roles but as something that really enhances them.”

That approach to viewing AI not as a replacement but as a force multiplier can pave the way for efficiencies through all aspects of operations, including fraud detection, compliance monitoring and customer service analytics.

“Our clients aren’t looking for the novelty of AI,” Bresnahan said. “They’re looking for impact.”

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