The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has awarded Palantir a contract to analyze the UK financial regulator’s internal intelligence data to help tackle financial crime, including fraud, money laundering and insider trading. The three-month trial contract pays the US AI company more than £30,000 per week to examine the FCA’s “data lake” and could lead to full procurement of an AI system.
The Miami-based company, co-founded by billionaire Donald Trump donor Peter Thiel, will apply its AI system called Foundry to analyze vast quantities of FCA information. This includes case intelligence files marked highly sensitive, information on problem firms, fraud reports from lenders, consumer complaints to the financial ombudsman, phone call recordings, emails and social media posts.
The contract had only one other unnamed competitor. Palantir already holds more than £500 million in UK public sector contracts, including deals with the NHS, military and police. The company signed a £330 million NHS contract in 2023 and a £240 million Ministry of Defence contract in December 2025.
The deal has raised internal concerns at the FCA. One source told The Guardian: “Once Palantir understands how we detect money-laundering threats, how do we know that they are ethically reliable enough not to go to share that information?” Campaign groups have criticized Palantir’s technology use by the Israeli military and in US immigration enforcement.
The FCA contract is part of the regulator’s effort to use digital intelligence to better focus resources on rule-breaking among the 42,000 financial services firms it oversees, from major banks to crypto exchanges. Palantir has defended its work, claiming it led to about 99,000 extra NHS operations being scheduled and helped UK police tackle domestic violence.
