Palantir has secured a three-month contract from the Financial Conduct Authority to analyse highly sensitive internal intelligence data as part of efforts to combat financial crime, the regulator confirmed on 23 March.

The US software company will be paid more than £30,000 a week to examine the watchdog’s extensive “data lake”, which includes case files, reports of suspected wrongdoing and consumer complaints, according to reporting by The Guardian. The trial is intended to test whether advanced analytics can help the FCA better detect fraud, money laundering and insider trading across the 42,000 firms it supervises.

An FCA spokesperson said the initiative forms part of a broader push to strengthen its use of technology. “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,” the spokesperson told The Guardian, adding that the regulator had run a competitive procurement process and put strict data protection controls in place.

According to the FCA, Palantir will operate strictly as a data processor, acting only on the regulator’s instructions while the FCA retains control of encryption keys for the most sensitive data. The regulator said all data will remain hosted in the UK, cannot be used to train Palantir’s own systems, and must be destroyed at the end of the contract.

Legal and academic experts have raised concerns about the implications of granting a private company access to such extensive intelligence. Christopher Houssemayne du Boulay, a barrister at Hickman & Rose, said investigations often involve large volumes of information relating to both suspects and innocent parties, warning that “if you ingest that data and use it to train an AI system, there are very significant privacy concerns”.

Professor Michael Levi of Cardiff University told The Guardian that while there has been “serious under-exploitation” of regulatory data, questions remain about governance. He said it was “a relevant question as to whether Palantir’s owners might tip off their friends about methodologies”.

The deal adds to Palantir’s growing footprint in the UK public sector, with contracts already spanning the NHS, police and defence. The company signed a £421 million agreement with the Ministry of Defence in December 2025 and previously led a £330 million NHS data platform project, both of which drew scrutiny from politicians and campaign groups over data use and ethics.

The FCA said the use of real, rather than synthetic, data was necessary to properly test the technology’s effectiveness in identifying financial crime risks.

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