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Most UK financial institutions have seen a promising AI initiative stall on the requirement that customer data must stay in the UK. The frontier models worth building on are provided by US companies, and for many firms the assumption has been that using them means customer data leaving the country. As a result, strong business cases have been left on hold.

That assumption is now out of date. The residency challenge has largely been solved, and many firms have yet to take advantage.

In our latest insights piece, Woodhurst consultants Mokhammed Sagaev and Charlie Patterson set out the route: frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic, consumed through the Microsoft Azure and AWS estates most institutions already operate, in regions that satisfy UK residency requirements.

The article covers the detail that is often missing from coverage of this topic: where data is actually processed on Microsoft Foundry and Amazon Bedrock, which cloud provides access to which models within a UK boundary, and the true cost position, where the trade-off today is less about price and more about model recency.

Read the full piece here.