Scottish Fintech Guiide Launch of First-of-its-Kind Retirement Support Tool
A new solution is helping people take greater control of their retirement planning and it has Scottish fintech innovation at its heart.
Pathlines, in collaboration with Scottish fintech Guiide and global investment firm Invesco, has launched a first-of-its-kind tool offering guided support for non-advised defined contribution (DC) pension savers. The new self-service platform allows users to manage their pension drawdowns with greater confidence, building on Guiide’s holistic planning technology that has already been helping individuals navigate complex retirement decisions for over three years.
Initially available to anyone over 50 who is not yet drawing their pension, the tool enables savers to create a sustainable plan within Guiide, consolidate their pots with Pathlines, and link their cashflow projections to real pension accounts. The system then allows them to review and adjust their plan each year, offering an intuitive and dynamic way to stay on track with their long-term financial goals.
The partnership demonstrates the power of collaboration between fintech innovators and established financial institutions to deliver solutions that bridge the gap between advice and guidance, a key focus of ongoing regulatory and industry discussions.
Christine Hallett, CEO at Pathlines Pensions, said:
“Pathlines is centred on helping individuals take control of their financial future by empowering them to shape their own path to retirement. We’re proud to partner with Guiide and Invesco to deliver this innovative solution for those at the very beginning of their retirement journey.”
Guiide Chairman, Ruston Smith, added:
“Our goal is to make sustainable retirement plans a reality as simply as possible for the non-advised. We hope this new tool will help reduce the risks of drawdown for many savers.”
Georgina Taylor, Invesco’s EMEA Head of Client Investment Solutions, noted that decumulation — the process of managing and drawing down pension savings — is a core strategic priority for the firm, adding:
“Cashflow planning tools such as Guiide play a critical role in ensuring there’s a robust retirement platform for everyone, regardless of how they choose to access their savings.”
Supporting Innovation in Financial Guidance
This launch comes as FinTech Scotland, through the Financial Regulation Innovation Lab (FRIL), recently announced a UK-wide innovation challenge on the Advice-Guidance Boundary Review in partnership with leading financial institutions. The initiative invites fintech innovators to co-create next-generation solutions that make it easier for consumers to access the right kind of support at the right time, exactly the kind of practical innovation exemplified by Guiide and its partners.
Celebrating Scotland’s FinTech Champions
On Wednesday evening, the Scottish FinTech Awards returned to Edinburgh, bringing together the Scottish fintech cluster for a night of recognition, networking, and inspiration. The awards, organised by Digit and held as part of the Scotland FinTech Festival and hosted at the EICC recognised organisations and individuals pushing the frontier of financial innovation in Scotland.
The breadth of categories underscores how far fintech in Scotland has matured, from climate impact and digital transformation to partnership models, RegTech, and AI/data usage. This year saw a threefold increase in terms of entries which reinforces the claim to being a meaningful a leading fintech cluster, alive, competitive, and attracting global attention.
In the last 12 months the FinTech Scotland cluster recorded 8 % year-on-year employment growth in 2024 and 11,300 people are now working in fintech across Scotland.
The winners
- FinTech of the Year: Loveelectric
- Climate & Environmental Impact: CienDos
- Best Start Up / New Entrant: Finspector
- Best Use of Data / AI: Aveni
- Digital Transformation: GoCodeGreen
- Financial Services Innovation: Mylo (Aegon)
- Financial Technology Partner: Snugg
- Outstanding Leader: David Ferguson (Seccl)
- Social Impact: Stellar Omada
- Special Recognition: Adam Betteridge (TSB)
- Evangelist: Sheetal Dash (Barclays)
- Best Fintech Collaboration: Level E Research & Aberdeen
Best RegTech Innovation of the year
At FinTech Scotland, we were particularly proud to see the RegTech Innovation award go to the Financial Regulation Innovation Lab (FRIL). It’s not just a win for FinTech Scotland but for the whole cluster as demonstrated by the diversity of people on stage to collect the awards from fintechs to established financial firms, from universities to FinTech Scotland colleagues.
The award is an affirmation of the vision behind FRIL and the collaborative approach we believe is essential to the future of regulation, compliance and consumer outcomes in financial services.
Tackling the eSignature challenge in financial services
For established financial firms and fintechs, getting documents signed is a routine part of doing business. However, in regulated sectors, this far from a simple click and can be time demanding. The challenge is ensuring that each signature is genuine, the signer’s identity is verified, and the process stands up to legal and compliance scrutiny.
The problem: when speed meets risk
Digital transformation has made signing a document as easy as pressing a button, but not all eSignatures are created equal.
- Click-to-sign methods offer convenience but can leave gaps in proving who actually signed.
- In high-value transactions such as lending agreements or investment contracts, these gaps create legal and regulatory risk.
- For scaling fintechs, enterprise-grade solutions that meet evidentiary standards can be expensive, with licensing fees adding hidden operational costs.
This leaves many firms in a bind: how to balance speed, client experience, and compliance without breaking the budget.
The solution: a verified approach
Syngrafii emerged from a unique collaboration between CEO Matthew Gibson and Canadian author Margaret Atwood, initially to create remote wet-ink signatures for book signings. That invention evolved into a secure document execution platform designed for high-trust environments.
The system combines:
- Biometric ink signature capture – recording pressure, speed, and stroke data.
- Live video signing sessions – visually confirming the signer’s identity in real time.
- Tamper-proof audit trails – preserving every step of the transaction in a MasterFile™ for evidentiary use.
The result is a signing process that mirrors the assurance of in-person signing, but with the reach and efficiency of digital.
For growing fintechs, Syngrafii’s Pay-As-You-Sign™ model removes the barrier of large annual license fees. Firms pay only for the transactions they complete, making enterprise-grade compliance achievable without committing to long-term, high-cost contracts.
Use cases range from:
- Client onboarding with ID verification.
- Loan and mortgage approvals requiring verified signatures.
- Wealth management agreements where client trust is paramount.
View Syngrafii’s profile on FinTech Scotland’s website.
Aveni brings wealth-management heavyweights together to accelerate responsible AI
Edinburgh-based fintech Aveni has brought together a new Customer Advisory Board made up of senior technology and operations leaders from Succession Wealth (part of Aviva), Schroders Personal Wealth, 7IM and Rathbones. The group will act as a sounding board for Aveni’s product roadmap while driving industry wide collaboration on safe and effective AI adoption in financial advice and wealth management.
By pooling insight from four major advice firms, the board will help ensure new tools are built with practitioners, not just for them. It aligns with the collaborative ethos we see across the Scottish fintech community.
Early priorities include balancing client expectations, regulatory obligations and operational pressures. Regular workshops will provide an agile feedback loop so that lessons learned in one organisation can quickly inform solutions used across the market.
Building on FinLLM
The board’s formation follows Aveni’s May launch of FinLLM, one of the UK’s first domain specific large language models trained on financial services data and aligned with FCA and forthcoming EU AI Act requirements. Early benchmarking shows FinLLM outperforming general purpose models on specialist tasks while maintaining strong baseline accuracy.
Why Scottish fintech GiftRound made UX a priority?
For GiftRound, creating a frictionless, intuitive and customer-centred experience is core to their mission: making it easy for people to contribute to group gifts online.
As the platform gained traction and the customer base grew, founder Craig Forsythe saw the opportunity to strengthen the user journey and make every interaction more seamless.
“User experience isn’t just about how things look,” Craig explains. “It’s about making people feel confident using the platform, whether they’re setting up a collection or chipping in for a friend’s birthday.”
The GiftRound team began looking more closely at how people moved through the product, from the first visit to completing a group contribution. Small moments of friction, unclear messaging, or awkward flows were quietly affecting engagement and satisfaction.
To explore improvements, GiftRound partnered with design studio Interaktiv for a free user experience design workshop.
In just an hour, they had:
- Identified specific ways in which the brand could be elevated to reflect the strength of the product, then set out practical steps for how that could be done.
- Pinpointed parts of the user journey that weren’t working as hard as they could, and made recommendations on how to go about fixing them.
What began as a one-hour design conversation led to a deeper review of the platform, a new brand, thoughtful changes across the customer journey, and a new website.
“The UX changes we made have had a huge impact for our team and for our customers,” Craig says. “It’s made the whole GiftRound experience feel easier, faster, and more enjoyable.”
Live podcast episode from Money20/20
A conversation live from Money20/20 2025 in Amsterdam with 4 fintech businesses, part of a Scottish delegation that saw 10 fintechs exhibiting at Europe’s largest fintech conference led by Scottish Development International and FinTech Scotland.
Dan from CreditNature, David from BigSpark, Jamie from Aveni and Michael from Transwap offer their views on the conversations they’ve had, the speakers they’ve listened to and reflect on the impact that Money20/20 can have for their business.
Bringing Cash Closer to Digital: OneBanx Integrates Cash Access into Banking Apps
Scottish fintech OneBanx is launching a strategic initiative to ensure cash access doesn’t get left behind by working with partner banks to embed cash withdrawal and deposit functionality directly into mobile banking apps.
This new integration means customers will soon be able to use their bank’s app to initiate transactions at OneBanx kiosks, without needing a physical card or third-party wallet. It’s a move designed to enhance customer experience while making in-person cash services more accessible through digital channels.
While digital wallets have simplified spending, OneBanx aims to complement this trend by boosting the utility of banks’ own apps. The company’s joint white paper with Enryo, “Cash as Payments Infrastructure,” reinforces the point: most people in the UK still use cash occasionally, even in an increasingly cashless society.
The integration also offers tangible benefits for banks:
- A seamless customer journey within their existing app;
- Greater engagement with less digitally-active customers;
- And a cost-effective way to extend reach without reopening branches.
Pilots with partner banks are underway, with full deployment expected later this year.
“Our goal is to create real-world utility for digital banking while still supporting essential in-person needs,” said Javed Anjum, CEO of OneBanx. “This initiative helps banks stay connected to communities in a way that’s sustainable and scalable.”
Turning the Tide: How SensFish Is Powering Better Maritime Investment and ESG Decisions
Financial institutions are sharpening their focus on climate risk, ESG disclosures, and sustainable investment. At the same time supply chains, shipping emissions and biodiversity-linked investment products, are increasingly on the balance sheet but reliable, decision-ready data has been hard to come by.
The Challenge: Ocean Impact, Low Visibility
Financial stakeholders are under pressure to assess the environmental impact and transition readiness of companies operating in ocean-related sectors. Yet data on maritime carbon emissions, biodiversity, and regulatory compliance remains fragmented, inconsistent, or inaccessible, making it difficult to price risk accurately, validate sustainability claims, or identify new opportunities.
The Solution: Ocean Intelligence for Finance
SensFish delivers a scenario-led analytics platform that turns open, maritime-specific data into actionable intelligence. The solution integrates historical, real-time, and predictive datasets such as satellite tracking, vessel surveillance, and ecosystem modelling. By doing so, SensFish enables users to:
- Quantify and forecast carbon impact across maritime supply chains (including sequestration potential and emissions),
- Verify compliance with sustainability standards (e.g. reducing IUU fishing via vessel monitoring),
- Support biodiversity-linked investments through monitoring of wild fish stocks and aquaculture patterns,
- De-risk projects by modelling scenarios for ESG outcomes, operational constraints, and regulatory exposure.
All this is delivered in a user-friendly platform that simplifies complex data and aligns with global Net Zero and ocean disclosure frameworks, turning compliance into strategy and reporting into opportunity.
SensFish’s traction is growing. In the past year, the company has:
- Been selected for the European Space Agency Business Incubation Programme,
- Partnered with UNCTAD and presented at the Monaco Ocean Finance Forum, part of the UN Ocean Conference,
- Joined the Innovate UK InvestAbility programme and Converge Net Zero cohort,
- Secured support from Glasgow City Council and received international investor interest,
- Onboarded a publicly listed UK client with global operations.
These milestones reflect a rising demand for deeper ocean intelligence among forward-looking financial institutions and corporates alike.
Discover more about SensFish
HAELO and RegGenome Partner to Launch Horizon Scanning Platform
The pace of regulatory change continues to intensify, with new updates emerging globally every few minutes. In response, Scottish fintech HAELO has partnered with regulatory data specialist RegGenome to introduce REGENESIS, a new platform designed to support compliance professionals in navigating complex and rapidly evolving requirements.
REGENESIS combines RegGenome’s structured and AI-powered regulatory datasets with HAELO’s automation capabilities to streamline the horizon scanning process. The solution targets mid-tier financial institutions and SMEs initially, with plans to scale toward larger firms.
The platform offers governance, risk, and compliance teams a single access point to regulatory information from hundreds of authorities across jurisdictions. It integrates into existing workflows, helping teams prioritise responses to emerging obligations while reducing reliance on manual tracking.
Key features include automated rule detection, curated insights, and contextual tagging to assist users in identifying regulatory developments relevant to their operations. This shift toward automation is expected to allow compliance professionals to reallocate time toward higher-value tasks such as risk analysis and controls assessment.
The collaboration between HAELO and RegGenome has already attracted attention from a broad cross-section of the industry. The platform was recently introduced to representatives from organisations including HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group, Citi, Baillie Gifford, Virgin Money, and FinTech Scotland.
Commenting on the partnership, Mick O’Connor, Founder and Managing Director of HAELO, said:
“I was looking for a partner who could deliver validated, explainable regulatory data. RegGenome demonstrated both the technical expertise and openness to collaborate in bringing effective GRC solutions to market.”
Mark Johnston, CEO of RegGenome, added:
“HAELO brings a practical approach to regulatory automation. This partnership complements our existing ecosystem and strengthens our efforts to help firms adapt to ongoing regulatory change.”
Aveni Unveils FinLLM: A Tailored AI Model for UK Financial Services
AI fintech firm Aveni is bringing generative AI to the UK financial sector with the launch of FinLLM, a large language model purpose-built for regulated financial services environments.
FinLLM was developed over the last six months at Aveni Labs, drawing on both advanced natural language processing expertise and a deep understanding of compliance and risk frameworks in financial services. Designed specifically for the UK market, the model aligns with emerging FCA guidelines and the EU AI Act, and is built with transparency, safety, and regulatory standards at its core.
What sets FinLLM apart is its financial specialism. Unlike general-purpose language models, FinLLM is tuned using financial data (both structured and unstructured) to support use cases that demand precision and trust. From regulatory compliance to customer service automation, the model is designed to enhance performance and to keep institutions within strict governance boundaries.
The project has been strongly supported by two of the UK’s major financial institutions, Lloyds Banking Group and Nationwide, both of whom invested in Aveni last year. Their involvement helped shape the direction of the model, ensuring it remains grounded in practical industry needs. Aveni’s collaborative approach brought together in-house AI experts and partner data teams to test and refine FinLLM on real-world applications.
Performance benchmarking shows FinLLM consistently outperforms more generic models on financial tasks and retains robust results on broader evaluation sets. This performance is enabled by a data strategy and evaluation process focused on continual pre-training and fine-tuning to ensure accuracy, explainability, and resilience.
Lloyds Banking Group’s Group Chief Data and Analytics Officer, Ranil Boteju, described FinLLM as a “game changer” for the sector, highlighting its potential to support a range of AI use cases across the bank. Nationwide’s Chief Data Officer, Sri Kanisapakkam, echoed that sentiment, highlighting the potential for the model to improve customer service through responsible innovation.
According to Aveni CEO Joseph Twigg, FinLLM reflects the growing importance of AI sovereignty and the UK’s ability to build its own technology infrastructure.
“As adoption accelerates, it’s critical that we retain the capability to develop and scale high-performance models within the UK,”.
Dr Lexi Birch, Head of Aveni Labs, spoke about the collaboration between academic researchers and financial professionals in shaping FinLLM’s roadmap.
“This model is built for a sector where accuracy and trust are non-negotiable. We’ve created something that reflects those priorities from the ground up”.
With its core model now released, Aveni will begin integrating FinLLM into its product suite, including Aveni Detect and Aveni Assist, supporting a wider shift toward domain-specific AI agents. Future development will focus on scaling the model across industry environments, enhancing its capabilities with proprietary datasets, and fine-tuning alignment strategies to meet the demands of live deployment.