Why CFIT was created
The Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT) was a key recommendation of the Kalifa Review of UK Fintech in 2021, which positioned CFIT as an important component required to scale the UK’s fintech industry.
The ambition for CFIT is to ensure the UK can be a leader not only for fintech start-ups, but also the best place in the world to scale a business and take solutions from IP creation through to widespread adoption. Successful implementation of CFIT has the potential to drive job creation across the UK, global reach, and better financial outcomes for consumers and SMEs. The Kalifa Review proposed that CFIT should build industry coalitions and in doing so, would:
- Provide industry context for pre-product development
- Build partnerships between start-ups and incumbents
- Facilitate data sharing
- Enable proof of concepts to be scaled
HM Treasury (HMT) and the City of London Corporation (CoLC) committed a combined £5.5 million (£5m HMT and £500,000 CoLC) seed funding for CFIT in the October Spending Review 2021. This seed funding is for CFIT’s first three years only. After that, it is intended that CFIT will be privately funded.
