Three-quarters of UK financial institutions are now using AI. The FCA and Bank of England confirmed this in their most recent joint survey – and the Treasury Committee has since put the entire sector under scrutiny, expecting evidence-based governance, not aspiration.
What the regulator has not yet said publicly, but what is clear from the direction of travel, is this: the firms that will be asked the hardest questions are those that moved fast without the infrastructure to prove they moved well.
The FCA’s principles-based approach – Consumer Duty, SM&CR accountability, operational resilience – means every AI deployment is already covered by existing rules. The question is whether your evaluation process generated the evidence to satisfy them.
The Cost You Aren't Measuring
Every large financial institution is evaluating AI vendors. Most are running 200 to 300 evaluations in any given year – the majority of them invisible to the CIO, scattered across business lines, logged in no single system of record.
Each evaluation costs between £180,000 and £220,000 when you account for internal resource, security review, legal and compliance overhead, and the time of the engineers who never get to build anything because they are sitting in procurement cycles instead.
Sixty percent of those evaluations produce a vendor that is never deployed.
That’s an infrastructure failure. There was no neutral environment in which to test properly. No structured evidence framework. No audit trail. Governance entered the process at the end, when it could only slow things down, rather than at the start, where it could have accelerated them.
We call the delay between finding a vendor that looks right in a demo and a decision you can actually defend: decision latency. The average time from identifying a vendor to having evidence it works in your environment is 7.3 months. Multiply that across a full evaluation portfolio and you are not winning.
What the BoE and FCA are Now Watching
The regulatory environment has changed materially in the last twelve months. Four things matter for your evaluation infrastructure right now:
The FCA has confirmed it will not introduce AI-specific rules – but that is not a green light. It means every AI decision is measured against frameworks already in force. The question your COO and CFO will be asked is not whether you have AI. It is whether you can prove it belongs in your estate.
How NayaOne Reduces that Cost
NayaOne is the vendor evaluation infrastructure layer for financial services. Not a sandbox in the traditional sense – a complete evaluation pipeline, with governance embedded from day one rather than added at the end.
- Evaluations that used to take 7+ months run in weeks, because the environment, synthetic data, security frameworks and compliance guardrails are already in place. Your engineers test the technology. They do not build the test infrastructure.
- Every evaluation produces a structured evidence record — comparable, auditable, defensible to risk, architecture, and the board. No more spreadsheets. No more institutional memory that walks out the door.
- Sixty percent PoC failure rates drop because vendors are tested in conditions that mirror production, not in controlled demos. The decision is made on evidence, not on a presentation.
- The cost of a failed deployment — remediation, regulatory exposure, reputational risk – is avoided at the evaluation stage, where it costs a fraction of the price to catch.
If your institution is running 200 evaluations a year, moving evaluation infrastructure from ad hoc to governed reduces wasted spend, compresses timelines, and builds the compliance record your regulator will eventually ask for. The ROI is not in the technology. It is in the decisions you stop making badly.
In Production With Institutions You Know
NayaOne powers the FCA’s own Supercharged Sandbox – the regulator’s infrastructure for testing AI-driven financial products in controlled, synthetic-data environments. It is the same infrastructure, available to financial institutions building their own evaluation capability.
If you’re curious to understand how NayaOne can help simplify your enterprise AI adoption, book a call with the NayaOne team.
