UK Finance and CFTE Launch New Offering to Build AI Capability Across UK Financial Services

The offering brings together two distinct components: the AI Leadership Academy for senior leaders, and applied workshops for specific financial-services functions. Together, they are designed to help firms of all sizes move from AI awareness and experimentation to responsible adoption in real workflows.

London, 17 June 2026 : UK Finance and CFTE today announced the launch of a new AI capability-building offering for UK Finance members, designed to help financial-services firms develop the leadership judgement and practical functional capability needed to adopt artificial intelligence responsibly and effectively.

The launch comes as AI adoption accelerates across UK financial services and the wider UK economy. Artificial intelligence is moving beyond experimentation and becoming increasingly relevant to how firms make decisions, redesign work, serve customers, manage risk, investigate financial crime, strengthen resilience and compete.

For financial institutions, the challenge is no longer only to understand AI. It is to build the capability to lead, govern and apply AI in ways that are useful, controlled and aligned with the realities of regulated financial services. Senior leaders need the judgement, confidence and shared language to set direction, prioritise opportunities and oversee responsible adoption. At the same time, teams across critical business and control functions need to understand how AI applies to their own work, where it can create value, and where human judgement, accountability and controls remain essential.

The new offering addresses both needs through two complementary components.

The AI Leadership Academy is a six-part programme for senior leaders in financial services. It is designed to help executives understand the new AI reality, experience AI in action, assess the implications of agentic AI, prioritise credible use cases, strengthen governance thinking and identify the operating-model, talent and execution conditions required for responsible adoption at scale.

Alongside the AI Leadership Academy, UK Finance and CFTE are launching a series of applied functional workshops for teams working in specific areas of financial services. These workshops are designed around the practical realities of a particular function, helping participants understand how AI is changing their area of work, how it can support day-to-day workflows, and how to apply it productively and responsibly.

The initial functional workshops will cover five areas:

1. Generative AI for Risk, Compliance, Governance and Control – helping control-function professionals understand how AI can support analysis, evidence review, governance reporting and workflow quality while maintaining accountability and oversight.
2. Generative AI for Customer Operations, Consumer Duty and Customer Outcomes – helping customer-facing and operations teams apply AI to handovers, complaints preparation, vulnerable customer support, communications and service-quality review while supporting good customer outcomes.
3. Generative AI for Financial Crime, Fraud, AML and Sanctions – helping financial crime teams explore how AI can support alert review, case preparation, investigation summaries and evidence organisation while maintaining explainability, auditability and defensibility.
4. Generative AI for Operational Resilience, Cyber and Third-Party Risk – helping resilience, cyber and technology-risk teams understand how AI can support signal interpretation, incident briefings, supplier review and escalation discipline while recognising AI as part of the evolving threat environment.
5. Generative AI for Product, Payments and Service Innovation – helping product, payments and innovation teams use AI in discovery, journey design, prototyping and responsible innovation while considering customer outcomes, fraud friction, fair value and governance.

Each functional workshop is designed to be directly relevant to participants’ roles. Participants will work through function-specific examples and leave with an AI Readiness Action Brief identifying one workflow, one AI opportunity, one expected benefit, one control question and one practical next conversation to take back to their organisation.

Together, the AI Leadership Academy and the applied functional workshops create a joined-up route from leadership direction to functional adoption. Senior leaders build the confidence to set priorities, govern AI responsibly and mobilise their organisations. Functional teams build the practical capability to apply AI productively and safely in the work they already do.

The offering has been designed for financial institutions of all sizes. AI capability is becoming important across the whole sector, not only for the largest institutions. UK Finance members include firms that are large and small, national and regional, domestic and international, corporate and mutual, retail and wholesale, physical and virtual, banks and non-banks. The new offering gives members an accessible way to build capability across leadership and functional teams at a time when AI adoption is becoming a practical business, risk, customer and competitiveness issue.

Robert Moss, Principal and Head of Learning, UK Finance, said:

“Over the last 12 months, we have seen growing demand from members for practical, high-impact learning that helps them respond to the opportunities and challenges of AI. In a crowded market, we have been keen to offer something distinctive: learning that not only helps individuals build new skills and futureproof their careers, but also supports firms in delivering meaningful business impact and long-term organisational effectiveness.

We have deliberately designed two complementary pathways. The first helps senior leaders develop practical, financial-services-specific AI capability and the insight needed to lead operational, organisational and cultural transformation. The second focuses on role-specific learning that helps individuals apply AI more effectively in their day-to-day work, enhance performance and contribute to transformation across their organisations.

We are excited to partner with CFTE, whose depth of experience in finance and technology education makes them a strong partner in helping our members build the skills and confidence they need to adopt AI responsibly and effectively”