Scottish Building Society subscribes to embedded AI to begin a new journey

SBS AI

SBS said of its latest offering, SBS AI: “Built on the SBS Data Platform, it draws on data already in SBS systems, governed and secured within each institution’s own environment, and delivers a generative AI layer.”

The supplier said this is an attempt to address the struggle finance firms often have to get AI projects off the ground due to complexity. “Most remain stuck in the experimentation phase due to two reasons: banks operate under significant regulatory scrutiny, and taking a pilot enterprise-wide adds another level of complexity.

“The latter requires banks to turn data from dozens of internal systems into trusted, quality data that can support AI at scale, something most institutions lack the infrastructure and resources to achieve. As a result, most financial institutions are still running pilots and proofs of concept that never reach enterprise-wide deployment.”

Denton said Scottish Building Society has just 100 staff in total and, as a small financial services firm, it relies on suppliers for support in AI: “From a cost and capacity basis, that is absolutely the way to go forward. If we were a Nationwide Building Society or the like, we would have the internal capability and resources to do this.

“But for a large part, and it’s not just the smaller ones, I think a fair number of big-sized organisations, should be working with the supply chain and the trusted partners because that data flow is already there.”

Trusted partner

He emphasised the need for a relationship built on trust. The building society has worked with SBS for many years and already runs its business using its software.

“It’s a partnership built on decades of working together. SBS look after our core platform which is where the majority of our data is, so it’s a long-standing relationship that’s built on trust and tenure,” said Denton.

Despite support from the supplier, the project is not just a case of flicking a switch on for the building society, which had to prepare the groundwork. “We knew that we wanted to go on a journey with regards to leveraging AI going forward, but equally, we needed to ensure that we had the foundations in place,” said Denton, adding that a lot of work was done to ensure its governance, policies and risk management framework were “AI friendly”.

But the two main areas of work were around data accessibility and employee inclusion, he stated: “Even though the data is ours, actually being able to access it was a big pillar, and the second big pillar was with regards to the cultural shift that this represented.”

“Going back to being a small organisation, we had to take our colleagues on the journey with us because this in itself is a fairly significant change. We’ve been very open and transparent with staff in that this isn’t necessarily going to remove a lot of jobs. But what it will do, given that we’ve got such a small workforce, is that it will require people to change how they do their roles.”

AI technology is used by all but 1% of UK financial services firms, according to a major annual study by Finastra. In its Financial services state of the nation survey 2026, the IT supplier described AI as the “connective tissue” of the finance sector and revealed that the technology’s evolution is also driving up spending in other areas, such as security and cloud.