Glimzer x Sprint Enterprise: a live data feed for UK financial advice firms
By Glimzer and Sprint Enterprise Technology
Every UK financial advice firm faces the same problem. Client information sits in one system, while plan and valuation data sits in another. Keeping them in sync leads to manual data entry, duplicated work, and advisers switching between logins to find what they need.
We’ve teamed up to address this.
From today, Glimzer and Sprint Enterprise are connected by a live data feed via Sprint’s FINIO data hub. Financial advice firms can stop entering the same information twice, stop switching between systems for current valuations, and work from a single, up-to-date view of each client plan, with far less manual reconciliation.
The problem we’re tackling together
Ask any practice manager where their time goes and manual admin will be near the top. Plan valuations entered into spreadsheets. Provider data keyed into the CRM by hand. The same client details entered multiple times because different systems require them. Advisers logging into one tool to check a figure, then pasting it into another.
None of this is new. And none of it is really an adviser’s job. It’s what happens when systems that weren’t built to connect are expected to share client data.
The fix is simple in principle: connect the systems, let the data flow, and remove the need for manual workarounds. In practice, it requires two teams committed to building it properly. That’s what this partnership delivers.
What the integration does
FINIO is a data hub that provides a single integration point, covering multiple investment platforms – with data normalised, reconciled and enriched and acts as a conduit between software providers and financial advice firms. With this integration, that data now flows directly into Glimzer.
Advice firms can access the data they need without logging into another system, without relying on spreadsheets, and without uncertainty about whether the data is current.
Why we’re building this way
Glimzer’s approach to integrations is focused. We prioritise a small number of integrations that work well with high-quality partners, rather than building a long list that only partially works. The teams we integrate with need to share our focus on reliability, responsible data handling, clear support, and delivering real value to UK financial advice firms.
Sprint Enterprise Technology, the team behind FINIO, fits that approach. Their data hub is widely used across the UK advice market, and a data feed like this requires a partner who will build and support it properly. Working with Gary, Emma, and the wider Sprint team has been straightforward from the outset.
A bit about FINIO
FINIO is built by Sprint Enterprise Technology. It sits between UK investment platforms and the tools financial advice firms use, consolidating plan and valuation data from multiple providers into a single feed. Firms using FINIO benefit from one source of data that is normalised, reconciled and enriched that would otherwise need to be gathered from each platform separately.
A bit about Glimzer
Glimzer is a CRM and practice management platform built specifically for UK financial advice firms. The aim is simple: give firms their time back. Less admin, more time with clients. It’s built in the UK and designed around how advice firms actually work.
What Tom says
“Manual admin is one of the biggest time drains in any UK financial advice firm. Duplicate data entry, switching between systems to find a single number, and maintaining records manually all add up. Every hour spent on this is an hour not spent with clients. Partnering with FINIO was an obvious step. Dan, Gary, Emma, and the wider Sprint team have been great to work with and made the build process smooth.”
Tom Matthieson, Founder, Glimzer
What Gary says
“We’re pleased to welcome Glimzer into the FINIO ecosystem. We focus on working with partners who are building well-designed, practical tools for UK financial advice firms, and Glimzer fits that well. By connecting to FINIO, firms can access reliable, up-to-date investment data within their CRM, helping reduce manual work and improving day-to-day efficiency.”
Gary Shepherd, Business Development Director, Sprint Enterprise Technology
How to switch it on
If you’re a Glimzer customer already using FINIO, get in touch and they’ll guide you through enabling the feed for your firm.
If you’re a financial advice firm reviewing CRM options and want to see how Glimzer works, book a 30-minute call and they’ll walk you through it.
Building societies face growing “Digital Delivery Gap” as member expectations outpace communication infrastructure
New research from Legado highlights structural challenges in communication infrastructure despite rising digital expectations from members
Building societies are facing a growing “Digital Delivery Gap” as member expectations for simple, digital communication continue to rise, while underlying systems and processes struggle to keep pace.
New research from UK fintech Legado highlights a structural challenge across the mutual sector. The Building Society Insight Report 2026 finds that 91% of building societies say their communication systems are not fully integrated with core member platforms, while 73% rely on three or more systems to manage communications.
At the same time, 82% of organisations continue to send more than a quarter of communications by post, and only 18% say members can complete most key actions fully online.
This gap is emerging as member behaviour shifts. 72% of members already use digital platforms to manage their accounts, and 80% would be willing to sign documents digitally if available.
Founder and CEO Josif Grace said:
“Building societies have made strong progress in digital banking, but communication has not evolved at the same pace.
The challenge is no longer digital adoption. It is how communication is delivered. The opportunity now is to simplify that experience and make it consistent for members.”
The research also highlights the impact on member experience. 22% of members say they have been unsure whether their building society received or processed a document they sent, reflecting a lack of visibility across communication journeys.
Legado will be sharing findings from the report at the Building Societies Association Annual Conference, taking place at the EICC in Edinburgh on 28–29 April, where the team will be available at stand 22.
The Building Society Insight Report 2026 is intended to support a wider industry conversation around how the mutual sector can modernise communication while maintaining the trust and accessibility that define the model.
The full report is available here.
Legado, headquartered in Edinburgh, supports financial institutions in delivering secure digital communications, document management and signing workflows. Its clients include FNZ, Quilter, Scottish Building Society, Moneyhub and Co-op Legal Services.
Profylr
TOKENIVE LTD
From innovation challenge to Scottish ambition: How Finspector is building the future of financial promotions compliance
By Phil Clements, CFA, CAIA, FDP, CEO at Finspector
When we incorporated Finspector in March 2025, we had a straightforward thesis: the way regulated firms manage financial promotions compliance is broken, and AI can help to fix it. What we didn’t fully anticipate was how quickly the right ecosystem support could turn that thesis into a live, revenue-generating platform, or how Scotland would become central to our story.
Twelve months on, Finspector has gone from concept to commercial traction, with signed proof-of-concept clients, paying customers, and recognition as FinTech of the Year at the Scottish FinTech Awards 2025. A significant part of that acceleration came through our participation in the Financial Regulation Innovation Lab, and it’s worth explaining why.
The problem we set out to solve
The financial services industry has a marketing compliance bottleneck that most people outside the sector don’t fully appreciate.
Every time a regulated firm publishes a social media post, launches a marketing campaign, updates a website, or prints a brochure, that content must comply with a dense web of financial promotion rules. In the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) oversees this regime, and it’s getting stricter. FCA interventions on financial promotions nearly doubled from approximately 10,000 in 2023 to nearly 20,000 in 2024.[1] Additionally, the introduction of Consumer Duty[2] has raised the bar further, requiring firms to demonstrate that every customer communication is clear, fair, and not misleading.
Yet the tools most firms use to manage this process haven’t kept pace. Compliance teams still rely on spreadsheets, manual screenshot archiving, and subjective interpretations of rules around things like the “prominence” of risk warnings. Over 75% of content typically fails its first compliance review, and sign-off cycles stretch from three days to a full week.[3] For marketing teams producing hundreds of assets per month across LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and beyond, this creates an impossible bottleneck.
Finspector was built to break that bottleneck.
What Finspector actually does
At its core, Finspector is an AI-powered platform that automates the review, monitoring, and governance of financial promotions across digital channels including text, images, video and social media.
The key innovation is what we call the rule-to-check engine. Rather than relying on generic keyword scanning or static templates, our platform converts each firm’s unique compliance policies and regulatory obligations into machine-readable, deployable AI checks. For example, a firm might hand us their internal financial promotions checklist, a document that runs to dozens of pages of detailed guidance, and we transform it into a structured set of automated checks that our AI agent can execute against any piece of content in minutes.
This is powered by a combination of large language models, computer vision, and a regulatory knowledge graph developed in partnership with academic partners at the Cambridge Judge Business School spin-out, RegGenome.[4]
The platform operates through four key features.
- Inspect reviews content before publication, flagging potential compliance risks.
- Monitor continuously watches published content across social media channels to catch issues post-publication.
- Approve gives compliance teams a structured workflow for sign-off.
- Audit maintains a complete, time-stamped trail of everything that’s been reviewed, exactly the kind of defensible evidence regulators expect under Consumer Duty.
The practical result is that compliance review times drop from hours to minutes, marketing teams can increase their output without compromising on compliance, and firms gain a scalable oversight framework across every digital channel.
Why the Financial Regulation Innovation Lab mattered
The Financial Regulation Innovation Lab[5], known as FRIL, is a Glasgow-based centre of excellence in financial regulation innovation. It’s a partnership between the University of Strathclyde, the University of Glasgow, and FinTech Scotland, and it has become one of the UK’s most credible programmes for advancing regulatory technology.
Finspector was selected as one of four grant winners under FRIL’s Future of Wealth Innovation Call in 2026, receiving £50,000 to further develop our solution. But to describe FRIL purely in terms of funding would miss the point entirely.
The programme accelerated our development by an estimated three to four months. The grant enabled us to dedicate engineering capacity to core platform features, including the social media monitoring module, the rule-to-check extraction framework, audit reporting, and early ISO 27001 alignment work, that would otherwise have been delayed. In practical terms, it funded approximately 1.5 to 2 additional FTE-equivalents of engineering and product development time across the programme period.
More importantly, FRIL opened doors. The programme’s industry partner network provided warm introductions to senior compliance, risk, and innovation stakeholders at major UK financial institutions, conversations that would typically take three to six months to initiate through cold outreach. Feedback from those sessions was consistently encouraging. Partners described Finspector as a “strong, credible proposition with a clear problem being addressed,” operating in “a good space” with a “reasonable market opportunity.” That kind of validation from tier-one institutions carries real weight when you’re a young company trying to earn trust in a, traditionally, risk-averse sector.
The structured pilot process was equally valuable – we onboarded live pilot clients during the programme, converting compliance policies into automated AI checks and deploying them against real content. One early engagement involved converting two detailed policy documents into 82 separate AI checks, covering jurisdictions spanning the UK, Europe, Australia, the US, Asia, and the Middle East. The feedback loops from these pilots (we tracked 23 distinct feature requests from early users) directly shaped our product development and reduced false positive rates.
Scotland as a strategic base
One of the less obvious outcomes of the FRIL programme is that it crystallised our commitment to Scotland as a long-term strategic base.
This wasn’t a foregone conclusion, Finspector is a UK-wide company, and our team and clients span multiple regions. But the depth of the Scottish fintech ecosystem, the quality of the academic institutions, and the genuine support from organisations like FinTech Scotland and Scottish Enterprise have made a compelling case.
We’ve already appointed a dedicated Account Manager based in Scotland, and we’re planning to bring on interns over the summer to support product development and operations. But the ambition goes well beyond that. Over the next three to five years, Finspector looks to potentially establish a permanent Scottish operational hub, and we’re targeting a Scotland-based team of around 20 by 2029.
Scotland already has a strong reputation in financial services and a growing fintech cluster. Our goal is to contribute to that by positioning the country as a centre for AI-driven regulatory technology innovation, a niche where Scotland can genuinely lead.
What comes next
Since 1 January 2026, Finspector is in active commercialisation mode with an aim of targeting 25 to 40 regulated firm clients over the next 12 to 24 months.
On the product side, Q2 2026 will see the launch of website monitoring and domain-wide scanning, enhanced security controls for ISO certification, and continued platform improvements driven by client feedback. Later this year, we’ll expand social monitoring automation, introduce version control and historic comparison features, and target our first enterprise-scale deployment. International rule libraries covering the EU and UAE are planned to follow, along with API integrations with compliance workflow systems.
We also participate in the FCA’s AI Supercharged Lab and AI Spotlight programmes, giving us a dual regulatory endorsement that few early-stage RegTech firms can claim.
A reflection
The FRIL programme has been transformational for Finspector. We entered with a strong technical foundation, we’re leaving with live pilots, paying customers, and a clear path to scale.
But perhaps the most lasting impact is strategic, FRIL didn’t just help us build a product faster; it helped us see where we should be building it. Scotland’s combination of regulatory expertise, academic depth, financial services heritage, and genuine ecosystem support makes it the right place for a company like ours to grow.
We’re just getting started.
Phil Clements is CEO of Finspector, an AI-powered RegTech platform for financial promotions compliance. Learn more at finspector.ai.
[1] https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-steps-action-against-misleading-financial-adverts
[2] https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/consumer-duty
[3] https://intelligencebank.com/insights/what-are-the-top-marketing-compliance-challenges/
[5] https://www.fintechscotland.com/research-innovation/financial-regulation/
Towards a Fairer Financial System: Insights from Gillian Docherty and Clare Reid
How do we design a tech‑driven, fairer financial future for everyone?
In this podcast, we speak with Gillian Docherty, Chief Commercial Officer at the University of Strathclyde and one of the UK’s leading minds in technology and computer science, and a collaborator on the Financial Regulation Innovation Lab’s AGBR Innovation Call; and Clare Reid, Strategic Innovation Director at FinTech Scotland.
We explore how to create a financial services sector that is future‑ready, responsible and built on collaboration and that ultimately serves everyday people, including those who are most vulnerable. With technology, AI and quantum technologies advancing at a rapid pace, we ask: what will it take to deliver real transformation for people, not just industries?
Throughout the episode, we paint a picture of the future world we will all be living and working in, bringing valuable insights for industry, policymakers and academia.
Risk Taxonomy as Governance Infrastructure: Adaptation, Traceability and Industry-led Use Cases for Fintech Innovation
Risk taxonomies in financial services are often presented as stable classification models: a hierarchy of principal risks that supports aggregation, governance oversight, and regulatory reporting. This paper argues that such a view is incomplete. In practice, a risk taxonomy is a governance infrastructure shared across stakeholder communities, including firms, supervisors, regulators, and the risk profession. Its value depends on traceability.
By traceability, we mean the practical ability to track and explain how risk categories, data, judgments, mapping rules, and mitigations are defined, applied, changed, and communicated within and beyond an organisation. Traceability matters because the quality of risk management is rarely observable in real time. Weaknesses may only become visible much later as business performance outcomes, operational incidents, or supervisory concerns, at which point feedback is costly, and remediation may be too late for firms and the wider system.
For CFO and related decision-makers, the central issue is not whether a taxonomy contains the right high-level categories (which tend to be stable across major firms), but whether the organisation can operate the taxonomy reliably: govern changes, manage mappings and aggregation, and produce assurance-grade evidence that connects categories to decisions and outcomes
Conceptually, we position risk taxonomy as a boundary object: a shared artefact that different communities can use for their own purposes while recognising it as “the same thing.” A taxonomy must be robust enough to maintain comparability across firms and reporting regimes, yet flexible enough to adapt to local realities: portfolio differences, organisational structure, data maturity, and changes in technology and competition. This predictable tension does not imply failure; it highlights that the taxonomy is doing coordination work across communities. The design challenge is to make this coordination auditable.
Empirically, we review risk management disclosures in the annual reports of three large UK banks over 2022–2024. We code for risk categories, implied hierarchies, grouping logic, and signals of year-on-year change. We observe strong stability at the top level (credit, market, liquidity/capital, operational, conduct, financial crime, model risk and climate-related risk as recurring themes), with change occurring mainly through shifting emphasis, greater granularity, and increased attention to non-financial and resilience-related risks. The implication is that innovation opportunities are less about reinventing categories and more about strengthening the socio-technical system around the taxonomy: data lineage, mapping logic, change control, governance workflows, assurance, and explainability, including for data-sparse or emerging risks where judgement and scenario processes play a larger role.
The paper’s contribution is a proposal for industry-led use cases, as a portfolio of well-specified problem statements that large financial services firms can publish to invite targeted innovation from fintechs. Each use case is designed to be procurement-ready and assurance-aware. The portfolio is organised by decision ownership, minimum data inputs, workflow controls (audit trail, segregation of duties, approvals), outputs (MI, reporting support, evidence packs), and success measures (time and cost saved, reduction in reconciliation burden, fewer classification disputes, improved supervisory confidence).
We conclude with implications for the UK supervisor. Rather than advocating new rules, we propose that supervisory engagement can be strengthened by encouraging firms to set expectations for traceability-by-design around taxonomies. By this, we mean controlled change, transparent mapping between internal granularity and external reporting, auditable lineage from source data to risk decisions, and explicit governance of data-sparse risks., including scenarios, assumptions logs, and review cycles. These steps can reduce reporting friction while improving the credibility of risk disclosures and the resilience of firms and the system.
About FRIL
Assure Continuity with Operational Resilience
How can critical Information and Communication Technology (ICT) providers help bring stability, security, and innovation to financial institutions?
The financial services sector is front and centre when it comes to the demands of regulatory oversight aimed at improving operational resilience. As a strategic ICT partner to many financial organisations, Sword see that these regulations bring two clear headline responsibilities – mandatory security requirements and minimum security standards. This is not whole story, as understanding the innovation opportunities afforded by tackling resilience requirements is key to building competitive advantage. We asked Rob Mossop, COO at Sword, to talk us through how financial institutions can navigate compliance and drive excellence across critical financial and national infrastructure.
Financial institution regulations for operational resilience
Security regulations are tightening for financial institutions across the UK and Europe, including EU regulation DORA, the UK CSR Bill, and NIS2 (learn more in the glossary below). These regulations are designed to guide organisations as they look beyond their own infrastructure and operations, encouraging them to think of the broader impact on how disruption affects customers, not just internal systems. This means it’s important for organisations to reengineer ways of working and reporting methods for operational resilience, to develop a deep understanding of dependencies on critical systems and their tolerance for disruption.
Scrutiny on critical ICT providers
Critical third-party ICT providers play a key role in improving resilience, often responsible for the IT and digital infrastructure on which organisations’ critical systems run. Your strategic technology providers should help you to interpret and implement resilience requirements, and under tightening regulations like the UK CSR Bill, will become subject to regulations directly. Strong partnerships will help protect your organisation against threats and demonstrate a robust supply chain to regulatory bodies.
Resilience as the foundation for innovation
Many organisations are moving beyond baseline regulatory requirements, driving increased growth and customer engagement through the smart use of the data and technology operational resilience requires.
The data needed to demonstrate compliance can become central to understanding your operations, customer behaviour and product performance. Innovative organisations are leveraging their improved operational resilience with third-party assurances, to adopt new technologies that boost effectiveness and performance. This combination of insights from critical system behaviour and deeper knowledge of (and trust in) third-party providers, allows organisations to understand what customers need from their products, and iterate toward that need more quickly, with lower risk.
Simplified, trusted, IT partnerships
Most organisations have a network of IT and digital providers, each delivering different services. Establishing a clear plan for how you would operate through disruption together, and the role each plays in response, is critical. Choosing capable ICT providers who have strong processes in place to assure resilient operations that meet compliance requirements is increasingly important.
Simplifying your partnerships around a small set of strategic partners with whom you engage directly in support of your operations resilience plans will help you to meet your regulatory needs and best prepare for disruption. Quickly identifying where disruption could occur in your supply chain can show fragility points and allow you to strengthen resilience, particularly when it comes to disruption response, where your IT partners need to understand their role in ensuring tolerance thresholds are not breached.
You should expect your technology providers to bring a wider view of processes and systems, moving beyond purely technology-based recommendations to encompass broader organisational needs, such as target operating models and service operating models.
Disruption to critical systems is rarely a “single provider” issue. Leaning on the operating models of your IT partners, and integrating them into your own, will help to ensure that multi-partner responses are easier to manage and monitor during an event.
M&A activity under the microscope
Financial institutions with intensive M&A programmes may find themselves under increasing scrutiny from all sides. Integration of systems and processes, or a need identified through due diligence and pre- or post-merger analysis, may add to compliance requirements. It’s important to keep a centralised view and protect all organisations involved to avoid inheriting bad behaviours, processes or suppliers that bring vulnerabilities. If you anticipate divesting, it’s equally important to prove that you’re selling a resilient, disruption-tolerant organisation that is ready to meet and report on compliance requirements.
Steps to take today
Current regulations do not provide detailed blueprints or formats for how organisations should track compliance. It is up to you, and your technology partners, to define these processes.
Take these regulations as a trigger to prepare against disruption and lay the ground for service progression – engage with your critical suppliers, map your third party dependencies, and proactively orchestrate threat lead penetration testing exercises. Begin thinking now about how the data and technology you invest in can move your understanding of business operations and customer behaviours onwards, to spot innovation opportunities early.
Engage your suppliers in your planning, and ensure that your operating model and technology decisions are supportive of those plans. We all need to understand our role in the wider ecosystem of protecting our financial infrastructure to deliver critical customer services that are more tolerant of, and more responsive during, disruption.
Terminology Glossary
DORA – Digital Operational Resilience Act – EU regulation in place from 17 Jan 2025 to strengthen digital resilience of financial entities.
UK CSR Bill – UK Cyber Security and Resilience Bill was first read to parliament 12th Nov 2025, making amendments to 2018 legislation that aim to make essential and digital services more secure.
NIS2 – Network and Information Security 2 Directive is an EU cybersecurity law.
What next?
If you’re interested in more information on how to build operational resilience, you can read more about Sword’s services here – https://www.sword-group.com/uk-platform/
To get in touch with someone at Sword to find out how we can help, please email uk.info@sword-group.com
About Sword
Sword is a leading business technology company headquartered in Aberdeen, employing 650+ people across the UK. Our mission is to solve complex challenges, build operational resilience, and create efficiencies for organisations in the Finance, Energy, and Public Sectors.
Building Pre-Commercial Challenge Spaces: Innovation Calls, Regulatory Adaptation and Productivity Pathways in Financial Services
This paper examines how challenge-led innovation calls can help shape and guide the emergence of a business and policy ecosystem around current regulatory problems in financial services. Drawing on field materials from the first three Financial Regulation Innovation Lab (FRIL) innovation calls held in 2024, it argues that relatively small publicly supported challenge programmes can identify promising firms. As importantly, they can create structured pre-commercial spaces in which financial services companies, fintechs, and intermediaries can articulate common problems, test emerging solutions, and develop pathways towards pilots and adoption.
The paper is situated in a wider policy context in which productivity, innovation and sector growth have again become central concerns in UK policy. The UK’s Modern Industrial Strategy identifies Financial Services and Digital and Technologies among priority sectors for long-term growth, while recent policy developments around procurement innovation show growing interest in reducing barriers between innovative smaller firms and large institutional end users (UK Government, 2025a). The Productivity Institute, meanwhile, has argued for a broader understanding of productivity centred not only on output-input ratios but also on coordination, knowledge use, capability development and diffusion (Coyle, 2021; Jones, 2023; UK Government, 2025b; van Ark, de Vries and Pilat, 2024).
The paper treats FRIL as an intervention in productivity-relevant processes. Across the first three calls, the immediate challenges for financial-services firms were compliance-related: AI-enabled compliance simplification, ESG and sustainability compliance, and Consumer Duty compliance. Yet the practical work extended beyond compliance into data, reporting, governance, customer processes, and operational change. The first call was structured around sponsor-specific use cases, provided strong lead-user access, and tended towards concentrated matching within particular firms. Later calls, especially the ESG-focused second call, moved towards co-developed challenge statements and multi-sponsor backing, creating stronger conditions for shared learning, diffusion, and wider ecosystem formation.
It is too early to claim direct measured productivity gains at the programme level. However, the evidence from the three calls is sufficient to identify several plausible productivity pathways: clearer problem articulation, reduced search and matching frictions, faster pre-commercial validation, reduced manual effort in compliance-related processes, and stronger conditions for diffusion and reuse. The central policy lesson is that innovation calls work best when they are treated both as competitions for technical ideas, and as mechanisms for shaping and guiding pre-commercial ecosystems around current business and policy problems.
About FRIL
AI Governance after MiFID II: Beyond (Mere) Technological Neutrality?
This article examines the evolving intersections between artificial intelligence (AI) and EU financial regulation, focusing on the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II). Grounded in the principle of technological neutrality, MiFID II seeks to enhance investor protection, safeguard market integrity, and ensure that innovation develops within competitive and well-regulated markets across the Union. The article argues, however, that while this neutrality renders the framework functionally enabling, it also leaves it normatively silent in the face of the distinctive and evolving risks introduced by financial AI. As AI applications become increasingly heterogeneous—both across the financial functions in which they are deployed and in their underlying lifecycles and value chains—MiFID II’s activity-based logic increasingly struggles to accommodate their diverse and evolving risk profiles. Reflecting the EU’s broader shift toward risk-based AI governance, the article outlines an initial taxonomy of financial AI applications designed to guide the proportionate alignment of regulatory obligations with AI-related risks, thereby supporting the continued adaptability, coherence, and future-proofing of EU financial services law.