The Bank of England has published summaries of the third round of Proof of Concept (PoCs) completed by participants in its FinTech Accelerator programme.

The FinTech Accelerator was established to deploy innovative technologies on issues relevant to the bank’s operations. Working in partnership with FinTech firms, the bank is seeking to develop new approaches, build its understanding of these new technologies and support development of the sector.

The latest PoCs covered four important areas of the bank’s work: analysing large-scale supervisory data sets; executing high-value payments across currencies and borders; identifying and applying cross-cutting legal themes from regulatory enforcement actions; and measuring performance on the bank’s internal projects portfolio.

• The bank worked with machine learning and AI firm Mindbridge Ai to explore the analytical value of using artificial intelligence tools to detect anomalies in supervisory data sets. The PoC enabled the bank’s internal team of data scientists to compare and contrast their own findings and the underlying algorithms being used, providing a complementary layer to the bank’s work.
• Working with Ripple, the bank explored how blockchain could be used to model the synchronised movement of two different currencies across two different ledgers, as part of the bank’s wider research into the future of high-value payments.
• The PoC with Enforcd demonstrated how technology could potentially facilitate compliance and the development of best practice in some key areas of regulation. Having easy access to relevant published regulatory enforcement decisions can be an important input to financial firms’ overall compliance programmes.
• The bank worked with Experimentus using their ORB tool to analyse historic Bank of England projects and visualise how they had performed against a range of standard key performance indicators (KPIs). This PoC allowed the bank to explore whether our existing test data were sufficient to carry out effective KPI reporting, and where further data collection might be needed.

Andrew Hauser, executive director for banking, payments and financial resilience at the Bank of England, said: “We have learnt a great deal through these latest Proofs of Concept, both in terms of what FinTech can do, but in also in terms of how it can help us work, think and communicate differently. The breadth of topics covered by these projects, and the accelerator programme as a whole, shows how much central banks potentially have to gain from continued engagement with the sector in delivering their mission of monetary and financial stability.”

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