This is a four-year PhD studentship, fully-funded and co-designed with Lloyds Banking Group. It will investigate a foundation model pre-trained on customer event sequences as a shared representation layer for tasks like risk assessment, pricing guidance, and customer behaviour prediction.

Key Information
Deadline 23:59, 18 June 2026
Value
£25,000 for academic year 2026-27, increasing by 5% annually over three years.
Eligibility
All applicants
Contact Email Email Admissions Team

The successful candidate will pursue their PhD in Financial Technology under the supervision of leading experts in probabilistic machine learning and artificial intelligence, Dr Victor Medina-Olivares and Dr Zexun Chen.

Background

The University of Edinburgh is one of the world’s top research‐intensive universities, ranked 4th in the UK for research power (Times Higher Education, Overall Ranking of Institutions), with about 90% of our research activity classified as world leading or internationally excellent in the latest Research Excellence Framework. With our expertise spanning science, engineering, technology, and medicine to economics, business studies and the arts, the University is home to a thriving research community with an extensive range of multi-disciplinary research expertise at the intersection of financial services and frontier technologies.

Based in the central campus at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Edinburgh Business School seeks to set the agenda across a wide range of business disciplines, with our research areas staffed by teams whose work has real influence in the private, public and non-governmental sectors. The Business School hosts the University of Edinburgh’s flagship financial technology research and innovation centre, the Edinburgh Centre for Financial Innovations, a collaborative centre jointly set up with the University’s School of Informatics, School of Mathematics, and the Edinburgh Futures Institute. The Edinburgh Centre for Financial Innovations works with external stakeholders to exploit the big data and computational evolution in financial services for societal and economic benefit. Using a unique interdisciplinary lens combining the physical and engineering sciences with the social sciences, humanities and the arts, the Centre engages in research addressing real world challenges facing businesses, the public sector and society in general today, challenges that the application of finance and technology-inspired thinking within an interdisciplinary context can help address.

Description

Modelling customer behaviour in financial services has long relied on static, cross-sectional models trained separately for each task, each requiring hand-crafted features derived from raw records. A more promising direction is to learn directly from the full history of customer interactions, treating the sequence of events as the primary input rather than a summary of it.

The core idea behind a sequential foundation model is to train a single large neural network on the full breadth of available customer data without relying on predefined labels and then adapt the resulting representations to many downstream tasks at once. Therefore, what distinguishes the sequential setting from a standard foundation model is that the input is an ordered history of events, read from beginning to end much like a document, allowing the model to capture how behaviour evolves over time rather than treating each customer as a static snapshot.

The insurance and pensions domain presents a natural, albeit underexplored opportunity to ask whether this paradigm transfers beyond payment transactions. Customer journeys in insurance are considerably longer, more irregular in time, and involve more heterogeneous event types than payment sequences, which makes the modelling problem harder, nonetheless also potentially more rewarding, since the signal encoded in a full claims and interaction history is richer than any fixed feature set currently used in practice.

The project is designed as a three-phase sequential process, with each phase having its own open research questions that are substantial anchors for a doctoral contribution at the University of Edinburgh. Thus, it is planned around industrial challenges that allow for academic progress and Lloyd’s Banking Group’s operational interests to be aligned.

Eligibility

Academic requirements

Successful applicants must meet the academic requirements of the PhD in Financial Technology programme. This normally requires a minimum qualification (or expected qualification if you are a current Master's student) of above-average academic achievement, quantified as 65% or above overall at the Masters level, with a distinction level dissertation (or UK equivalent) in the subject of: finance, economics, informatics, physics, mathematics, engineering, or another relevant programme with significant quantitative elements.

English requirements

The most commonly approved certificate is an IELTS, for which the minimum accepted score is 7.0 overall with at least 6.0 in each section.

Value

This award will cover the cost of UK/Overseas tuition fees plus an annual stipend for up to 4 years (valued at £25,000 for academic year 2026-27 with 5% increase every year for the next three years).

How to apply

The deadline to apply is 23:59 (GMT) on Thursday 18 June 2026.

To be considered, candidates must submit a programme application using the University's Online Application System

Selection process

Eligible applicants will be ranked by a selection panel and applicants will be notified if they have been shortlisted for interview by 23 June, 2026.

Interviews will be scheduled during the week commencing with 29 June, 2026. Candidates will be notified of the outcome of their application as soon as possible after the interview date.

The awarded candidate will join the programme in September, 2026.

Location

The successful applicant is expected to be pursue their studies in-person at the University of Edinburgh campus in Edinburgh, UK, and might be required to spend time at the industry partner’s Lloyds Technology Centre in Hyderabad, India as part of the scholarship.

Enquiries