AI for financial services.
Custom AI for reconciliations, reporting and KYC, with your people reviewing and signing off.
What AI can do in financial services.
AI is at its best on repetitive work with a clear right answer: matching records across systems, drafting the routine journal, reading client documents and pulling out the fields, and assembling the monthly report from the same exports.
Where firms like yours start.
It connects your CRM, your ledger and the rest of the stack, scoped at the audit rather than promised.
It builds the analysis and the board pack straight off those systems, with every figure traceable.
It matches your ledger against the bank feeds and sub-systems, flags the breaks and drafts the journal.
It lives inside the tools your team already uses, so nobody has to learn a new system.
Hours back on the routine checks, and a record of who approved what. It also cuts the cost of subscription tools you no longer need, and makes information faster to find.
The audit works out yours.
How we find where AI fits in financial services.
An AI Audit and Transformation is how we find where AI actually fits your firm. It is fixed in scope and fee, runs inside your team with the people who do the work, and ends in a costed, prioritised 12 month roadmap naming who owns each workflow. OpenKit becomes your business’s embedded AI team: the people who ran your audit stay on to deliver it. If there is nothing here worth automating, we will say so.
The build is part of the same engagement, and what goes live is measured against the hours the audit counted.
How we engage.
Most engagements start with the AI Audit and Transformation. What follows depends on what it surfaces: many teams keep us on as their Embedded AI Lead, and some commission a bespoke build where nothing off the shelf will fit. The AI Charter runs underneath whichever way it goes.
- AI Audit and Transformation Fixed in fee and scope: we measure where the month goes and hand back a costed, prioritised 12 month roadmap, yours to keep.
- Embedded AI Lead We stay inside your team, build the plan into the day’s work and train the people who run it.
- AI Charter It writes down what AI is used for here and who owns each workflow it touches.
Related work.
One controls-testing platform in production, and two discovery engagements that measured where the hours went before anything was built.
Stow Brothers Counting the admin before proposing a single agent Five workflows mapped and timed with the studio manager, then a computer-use agent blueprinted to reclaim about 50 hours of that. 172 hrs/mo Admin time measured 
FW Thorpe (Thorlux) Proving the data before specifying the report Occupancy records validated against the live dashboard, with board-ready reporting specified off the same data. ~6.5M Occupancy records validated Secure and private, as standard.
Your data stays yours, never trains anyone else’s model, and residency and lawful basis are settled before a model is picked. Private AI
ISO 27001, ISO 9001 and Cyber Essentials are certifications we hold, and we operate to UK GDPR. Solutions are designed to help meet the EU AI Act where it applies. We build to operate under the FCA’s expectations for accountability and record-keeping, and we are not authorised or regulated by the FCA.
The questions that decide it.
What does an AI consultancy for UK financial services actually do?
OpenKit audits where AI fits inside your permissions and where it does not as the opening stage of an AI Audit and Transformation, builds on the stack you already run (Microsoft 365, your CRM, your platform) and can leave an Embedded AI Lead in the team to keep the work compliant under Consumer Duty, SMCR and the post-DUAA automated-decision regime. The output is an auditable workflow, recorded so the accountable senior manager can show how each decision was reached.
Will AI replace advisors, paraplanners or compliance reviewers?
No. The FCA’s position is that senior managers retain personal accountability under SMCR regardless of how a decision was reached. The DUAA 2025 requires meaningful human intervention by a reviewer with authority and competence to override the AI for any significant decision. We build copilots that let advisors handle more cases at higher consistency, with a citation-anchored audit trail per interaction.
How does this work with the FCA Handbook, Consumer Duty and SMCR?
The audit produces an SMCR ownership grid that names the senior manager accountable for each AI-assisted workflow, a Consumer Duty fair-value and foreseeable-harm review of every workflow where AI touches a customer outcome, and an evidence plan documenting model selection, testing and ongoing monitoring. The FCA confirmed in 2026 that it will not introduce AI-specific rules.
What about PRA SS1/23 if we are a bank or PRA-designated firm?
SS1/23 is technology-agnostic but explicitly captures AI and ML models, and the PRA flagged AI adoption as a 2026 supervisory priority. For PRA-regulated firms we extend the audit to include the SS1/23 five principles and produce model-risk documentation that fits inside your existing MRM framework.
Can we keep client data on-prem or in a UK / EU controlled environment?
Yes. Anthropic Claude on UK / EU regions or OpenAI on Azure UK / EU as the default cloud options, open-weights models on private GPU for sovereign requirements, and full on-prem for firms where data residency rules out cloud LLMs entirely. We also ship zero-retention OCR. Every deployment carries an ISO 27001-aligned audit logging trail and a UK GDPR data processing register.
Does this integrate with our CRM, platform and Microsoft 365 estate?
Our verified integrations include Microsoft 365 (SharePoint, document libraries, Entra ID), Power Automate for workflow integration, Salesforce, REST/SOAP API connections, on-prem PostgreSQL, and Langfuse for prompt versioning and trace logging. We do not name core-banking platforms we have not delivered against; we scope the integration honestly during the audit.
Who is liable if an AI-assisted decision goes wrong under Consumer Duty?
Liability sits where it has always sat under SMCR: with the named senior manager accountable for the function. The DUAA 2025 reinforces this: meaningful human intervention is a statutory safeguard, and a human rubber-stamping the AI output does not meet it. We design the workflow so the human reviewer has the citations, the retrieved context, the model’s confidence signal, and a real path to override.
How is a financial services AI engagement structured?
Every engagement opens with the audit stage of an AI Audit and Transformation, which is fixed scope, fixed fee and scoped up front, mapping where AI fits inside your permissions and where it does not. The build that follows ships an integrated pilot inside your existing stack with the team trained on it. An Embedded AI Lead can carry delivery afterwards, and a Bespoke Build is scoped against what the audit surfaces.
What does a financial services AI engagement cost?
Pricing is fixed before kickoff and indicative figures are shared on a discovery call. The audit is fixed fee and fixed scope; What follows, whether that is the transformation build, an Embedded AI Lead on retainer or a Bespoke Build, is priced after the audit against what it surfaces. No surprises on the invoice, and no retainer required to reach the audit.
How is OpenKit different from the Big Four or an enterprise AI consultancy?
The Big Four split strategy and implementation across separate teams on separate budgets: the senior name who pitched is rarely the engineer who ships. Faculty AI (now part of Accenture) and the larger enterprise firms operate at scale on day-rate or time-and-materials engagements. Productised offerings sell a product, not a build against your own corpus. We do both: a senior engineer audits the work, scopes the build, ships the integration, trains the team, and can stay on as an Embedded AI Lead. Our audit is fixed fee, which a buyer can self-qualify against without a procurement cycle.
Find your first workflow.
We start with a conversation, audit where AI actually pays back, and build the first automation into how your team already works. We reply within one working day.