Innovate Finance has published a number of key findings from an industry consultation which aimed to explore the feasibility of an industry-led sandbox for testing off-market financial innovation.

Organised by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the consultation was conducted between July 2016 and April 2017. A full set of the consultation findings, best practices and recommendations will be published in early May 2017.

Innovate Finance found that industry sandboxes are an “advancement in open innovation” and “present an opportunity to further develop, accelerate and promote collaboration in the FinTech ecosystem”.

The firm also found that sandboxes could be useful as a means to accelerate:

- Solution development by providing the whole of the FinTech ecosystem with access to resources such as data, APIs, or reference architectures which enable entrepreneurs to create solutions which are additive and more readily integrated with the existing technology stack;
- Complex problem solving by facilitating industry collaboration identifying and addressing complex shared consumer, technological and regulatory challenges;
- Regulatory efficiency by encouraging regulators to engage as observers where industry can share knowledge early in the lifecycle of solution development.
- Sandboxes should be open to the whole of the industry ecosystem on a voluntary participation basis, and should be connected to other shared environments and testing sandboxes, Innovate Finance claims. They should be rich in resources such as data sets, APIs, reference architectures, analytics and audit tools, and showcase mechanisms.

The report stated: “The final consultation report will present the key findings from: surveys, collaborative design workshops, call for input, interview and roundtables with ecosystem participants.

“The consultation report is designed to provide industry with a comprehensive set of high level requirements, use cases, best practices and implementation options to allow industry participants to create industry sandboxes that are fit for their specific purposes.”

Share Story: