April 2023: CFIT’s Coalition-led approach to Open Finance and Regional Fintech Success

Since the landmark launch of CFIT at Nexus, Leeds University on 28th February, we are pleased to update you on a number of recent significant events and announcements that are already expediting our mission to unblock the barriers to growth for financial technology and lead the world in financial innovation.

Opportunities: Open Finance

Most notable was the government announcement at the start of UK Fintech Week delivered by Andrew Griffiths MP, Economic Secretary to the Treasury. This keynote speech announced that the first CFIT coalition will be targeting the major opportunities within Open Finance to benefit SMEs and consumers.

Creating the right conditions for fintech to scale is central to the CFIT mission and, by building on the transformative experiences of Open Banking, we know that the move to Open Finance will significantly expand the scope for financial innovation. Efficient, controlled sharing of data is the crux of Open Finance and our coalitions will bring together experts from across industry, policy and academia to curate the use cases and solutions to unlock any barriers to progression. A full copy of the minister’s speech can be found here.

Dovetailing this announcement was the same-day release of the Joint Regulatory Oversight Committee (JROC) Recommendations for the next phase of Open Banking – a significant report outlining a number of “necessarily ambitious” plans to realise the future potential of Open Banking and Open Finance. Aligning fully with CFIT’s positioning and coalition-led delivery model, this report highlights the need for government, regulators and industry participants to work together to achieve tangible outcomes for SMEs and consumers.

With the government and JROC both recognising the value of a collaborative approach and purposefully underlining their policy and regulatory commitments, we now know that we have an even stronger backdrop and remit for working with all FS ecosystem participants to accelerate financial innovation throughout the UK.

Collaboration: The Fintech National Network

We have continued to work across all the regions and sectors within financial services, ensuring that the highly successful fintech clusters across the UK are leveraged for input into our coalition focus groups.

The Fintech National Network consists of a number of hubs across the UK, all of them working to achieve positive economic and social outcomes by encouraging financial innovation, collaboration and inclusion.

The release of the recent Greater Manchester FinTech Sector Ecosystem Report 2023 showed just how effective results have been, as did the one-year anniversary outcomes of FinTech Scotland’s 10 year Innovation and Research Roadmap. Both these reports confirm that leveraging UK hub knowledge is key to regional and national sector success and we will ensure that all learning and case studies are built upon.

Academic Engagement

We have reiterated our desire to engage across the academic sector in order to showcase their part in financial innovation.

Academic institutions lead the way for systematic investigation and data exploration versus the most challenging issues and are central to opening up advancement opportunities for all across the financial ecosystem.

We aim to inspire more students to secure placements in these roles and build partnerships between those firms driving forward innovation, and academic institutions across the UK who are delivering the courses and training to our next generation of talent.

CFIT Growth

Operationally we are growing at pace. We are proud to have Ezechi Britton MBE formally join as our CEO and we have engaged recruit121 to support us as we actively recruit for three central roles:

• Director for Coalitions and Research
• Head of Talent, Engagements and Placements
• Director of Ecosystems and Partnerships

EY will also be our working partner for the curation of our first coalition.

CFIT is dedicated to serving this agenda.

As we look to the next stages, please do contact your regional bodies and trade associations if you would like to get involved.