Zopa AI skills foundation launches after 22 partners sign up

A coalition of financial services companies, which offers free artificial intelligence (AI) training to staff of its member organisations, has launched after boosting membership.

The Jobs2030 initiative was founded by Zopa Bank and credit rating company ClearScore, after Zopa initially announced it was looking for partners in August 2025.

Jobs2030’s goal is to ensure the UK finance sector can take advantage of AI by equipping staff with the right skills.

As well as the two founding members, the coalition now has 22 other members, which include banks and other financial services providers, such as NatWest Bank, Ernst & Young, and Domestic & General.

The five-year Jobs2030 programme is offering free training modules in AI disciplines for fintech workers at member companies.

Zopa expects between 6,000 and 8,000 people to gain new skills in the first year, with numbers increasing in subsequent years. By 2030, the initiative aims to have trained 100,000 people.

The first five courses offer training in applied generative AI (GenAI) for operations, engineering and compliance teams. A further 12 modules are expected by the end of the year. The training modules are delivered through Zenarate, a digital learning platform, and will integrate directly with leading large language models (LLMs) such as Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.

Participants will learn through AI coaching, live simulations and real-world scenarios, according to Zopa. Courses include modules on getting started with prompting, agentic coding setup, agentic coding fundamentals, good customer outcomes with AI, and how to use AI to support solutions contact centres.

The launch comes as the finance industry is undergoing a transformation that will change traditional roles in the sector. Clare Gambardella, chief customer officer at Zopa Bank, told Computer Weekly: “We’ve done research about the likely impact of AI on the financial services sector and found that there is an enormous amount of investment across all of the financial services firms into AI, and also a very big expectation about the return on investment of that.”

A survey by Zopa and Juniper Research found that UK banks will spend £1.8bn on GenAI by 2030, with an expected 100% return on investment. It found that GenAI will save 187 million labour hours, mainly in back-office roles, and that 27,000 jobs could be displaced by 2030. 

For example, at Zopa, about 1,000 employees are trained to use GenAI tools like ChatGPT. Teams at the bank have built more than 600 custom GPTs for internal use. AI now handles 100% of Zopa customer service chats, which total around 45,000 per month.

“One of the things we wanted to do was work at an industry level to understand how we can create a financial services workforce that has the right skills to move into new roles [created by AI], those changed roles, and make sure that people are future-ready for the AI tools that are coming into the market,” said Gambardella.

“So, the pledge that we created alongside ClearScore was to reskill or upskill 100,000 financial services workers by 2030,” she added.

“We couldn’t do that alone, [so we] put together an advisory council to ensure that we are setting a really high bar for the scheme, and also bringing on board financial services and other partners across the industry,” she added. “We’re now at a point where we have the first set of partners involved and the first set of training available.”

Gambardella sits on the 13-member advisory council, which ensures the initiative stays focused on the real needs of workers across the UK financial services sector. Other members include Anna Brailsford, CEO of Code First Girls; Ian Bolton, academic director at TechSkills UK; Markos Zachariadis, professor in financial technology and information systems at the Alliance Manchester Business School; Pinar Ozcan, professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at Said Business School, University of Oxford; and Paul Dongha, head of responsible AI and AI strategy at NatWest.

Lucy Rigby MP, economic secretary to HM Treasury, said: “It is critical that people have the confidence and skills to seize the massive opportunities that will stem from the safe adoption of AI. Initiatives like Jobs2030, and our plans to encourage the safe adoption of AI across financial services, will make sure they do.”

To retain membership, companies must create a training module in the first 12 months.

Up to 2030, the cost of the training programme will be covered by Zopa, its fellow members and pro-bono work. After that, a different commercial model will be sought.