Palantir trial plugs into UK financial watchdog's data trove

US data miner Palantir has quietly landed inside the UK's financial watchdog, plugging into a trove of sensitive data as Whitehall simultaneously insists it wants to wean itself off exactly this kind of dependency.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has handed the American analytics biz a three-month trial contract worth more than £30,000 a week to analyze its internal "data lake," a sprawling repository of regulatory intelligence covering fraud, money laundering, insider trading, and consumer complaints.

According to The Guardian, which first reported on the deal, Palantir will gain access to data including case files, reports from banks and crypto firms, and even communications data such as emails, phone records, and social media material tied to investigations.

The idea, at least on paper, is straightforward: use Palantir's software to help sift signal from noise across the roughly 42,000 businesses the FCA oversees, and spot patterns of financial crime faster than human analysts can manage alone.

If this sounds familiar, that's because it is. Palantir has spent the past few years embedding itself across the British state – from the NHS to policing and defense – racking up more than £500 million in public sector contracts in the process.

Critics have long described this as a classic "land and expand" strategy: start with a narrowly scoped deployment, prove value, then become very hard to remove. The FCA deal, which appears to follow the same pattern, arrives just days after the government signaled that it wants to rethink how it buys technology, amid concerns about overreliance on a small number of large vendors and the need for more "sovereign" capability.

Yet here is another sensitive system being handed, at least temporarily, to a US company whose entire business is built on ingesting and analyzing other people's data.

The FCA, for its part, has stressed that Palantir is acting strictly as a "data processor," that all data remains hosted in the UK, and that the company cannot use the information to train its own models.

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"Effective use of technology is vital in the fight against financial crime and helps us identify risks to the consumers we serve and markets we oversee," an FCA spokesperson told The Register. "We ran a competitive procurement process and have strict controls in place to ensure data is protected."

Those assurances mirror language used in earlier public sector deals, particularly in the NHS, where officials have repeatedly argued that contractual controls and technical safeguards govern use. Whether that is enough to calm critics is another matter.

A spokesperson at Palantir, told us: "As with all of our UK work including with the NHS to increase the number of operations and with the police forces to tackle domestic violence, data cannot be commercialised in any way. The software can only be used - legally and contractually - to process that data in strict accordance with the instructions of the customer.

There's also the small matter of optics. Palantir's track record – spanning US defense, intelligence, and immigration enforcement – has made it a lightning rod for concerns about surveillance and civil liberties, especially when deployed in civilian contexts.

Still, for regulators under pressure to do more with less, the appeal is clear. The FCA is sitting on vast amounts of data, much of it underused, and AI vendors are lining up to promise that they can turn it into actionable intelligence.

Whether that promise outweighs the risks of handing the keys – even temporarily – to a company that has made a habit of sticking around is a question the UK keeps asking, and so far, keeps answering the same way. ®