Overview
- News reports Monday detailed a three-month FCA pilot with Palantir’s Foundry platform to search its internal intelligence trove for fraud and money-laundering leads.
- The project opens a unified data store known as a data lake, which holds case files, reports from banks and crypto firms, emails, phone recordings, and social media tied to investigations.
- The regulator says the firm will operate only as a data processor with all information hosted in the UK, FCA-held encryption keys, mandatory deletion after the trial, and any new intellectual property staying with the FCA.
- The deal has been reported at more than £30,000 a week and could pave the way for broader AI use across oversight of roughly 42,000 firms, raising worries about dependence on a single US vendor with a record of long-term embeds.
- Green and Liberal Democrat MPs called for a rethink and privacy advocates, along with some FCA staff, warned about using real data, while City-focused outlets emphasized safeguards and procurement risks and activist press highlighted the company’s controversial public-sector work.