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European banks bet on open models: Revolut, bunq, Stripe

At GTC Berlin, European banks and payment companies showed how they run open weight models trained on their own data, on infrastructure they control. bunq says open models match leading closed models at 60% of the cost per answer.

By: Mikola Máté Patrik · · 2 min read

NVIDIA open models for European financial services
Image: NVIDIA · Press kit · Official NVIDIA press/blog image · Source

What happened?

On October 22, NVIDIA rounded up European financial firms building on open weight models (NVIDIA blog). The shared approach: own transaction data, own or local cloud, controlled costs.

Proprietary foundation models

  • Revolut is rebuilding its technology stack on a single foundation model called PRAGMA. It runs in production on Blackwell Ultra GPUs with cuDF and Dynamo-Triton, initially serving 80 million customers.
  • Lloyds Banking Group built ATUM, a transaction foundation model that turns billions of banking transactions into reusable features, on RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs.
  • Starling Bank trained its agentic Starling Intelligence model on its own transaction data on Civo's U.K. cloud.

Open models in products

  • bunq's assistant Finn now runs on open weight models on Nebius. The bank says it matches leading closed models at 60% of the cost per answer.
  • Modulr is building specialized payment models on the open Nemotron-3-Ultra-550B.
  • NatWest is using the Nemotron 3.5 ASR speech model to recognize British accents and financial terminology.
  • Santander is an early adopter of the new Kumo models for structured banking data.

Data pipelines and fraud

  • Stripe measured 42x faster data pipelines and 92% cost savings for Radar fraud detection with GPU-accelerated Ray Data in offline testing.
  • HSBC gets 5x faster data processing for near-real-time client insights with Starburst's GPU engine.
  • LSEG offers up to 10x faster historical tick data analysis with the Polars GPU engine.

Why it matters

For banks, closed APIs raise two problems: cost and data leaving the building. bunq's 60% figure suggests a well-tuned open model can already compete in a production product. All numbers come from the companies or NVIDIA, with no independent verification.

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