Benefits reliance rising in every region of Great Britain, new financial data shows
Smart Data Foundry launches new Benefits Reliance Indicator using transactional data from 5 million bank accounts
Smart Data Foundry has launched a new data indicator designed to help policymakers, local authorities and researchers better understand where people may be coming under increasing financial pressure.
The new Benefits Reliance Indicator, available through their map-based Economic Wellbeing Explorer uses aggregated anonymised transactional data from NatWest. This data covers five million consumer current accounts across Great Britain and highlights areas where benefits from Universal Credit, Housing Credit and Tax Credits constitute 20% or more of people’s incomes.
The launch comes at a time of continued cost-of-living pressure, with the Food and Drink Federation forecasting food inflation could reach up to 10% by the end of 2026 and the energy price cap expected to rise again this summer, local authorities face growing pressure to target support effectively. At the same time. Department for Work and Pensions statistics show that more than a third of people (32%) receiving Universal Credit are in work, underlining the growing role benefits play in supplementing low or variable incomes.
Unlike traditional survey-based datasets, the Benefits Reliance Indicator provides a near-real-time view of how people’s income composition changes month-to-month. The indicator measures the proportion of people in a local area for whom means-tested benefits account for 20% or more of total income. This threshold was developed in consultation with local authority stakeholders as a meaningful signal of financial vulnerability.
The data combines income from Universal Credit, Housing Credit and Tax Credit with earnings, pensions and other income sources to provide a fuller picture of financial wellbeing – and where communities may be more exposed to labour market changes and welfare policy reforms.
Data to 29 March 2026 reveals:
- A rising proportion of people across England, Scotland and Wales relying on benefits for at least 20% of their income. This has been rising for the last two years. Scotland has seen the biggest increase, at 1.83% over the past 2 years, with benefits reliance in Wales increasing by 1.7% and in England by 1.25%.
- There are strong regional variations within England, Scotland and Wales:
- Wales has the overall highest rate of benefits reliance, with South East Wales at 9.36% – an increase of 2.11 percentage points over the last two years. Whilst North Wales has the lowest proportion at 6.64%, it has also seen a rise in benefits reliance over the last 2 years, as has Mid and South-West Wales – rising from 6.05% in March 2024 to 7.59% in March 2026.
- In Scotland, overall reliance is lower than in Wales and whilst there is an upward trend, it is much less steep. However, in recent months Eastern Scotland has seen a rise of 4.82 percentage points to 7.37% of our sample in that region with incomes consisting of 20% or more from Universal Credit, Housing Credit and Tax Credit. West Central Scotland has seen a similar rise, with a 2.42 percentage pointincrease over two years and 8.38% of our sample now showing benefits reliance. North East Central and the Highlands and Islands have shown the smallest increases, both under 1 percentage point.
- In the North of England, the area with the highest rate of benefits reliance is North East England, at 9.49% of our sample. North East England is also the region with the biggest growth (1.6 percentage points), followed by Yorkshire and the Humber (1.51 percentage points and North West England (1.42 percentage points).
- In the South of England, benefits reliance becomes less prevalent; the South East has the lowest proportion at 4.85%, but similarly to Scotland and Wales all English regions are seeing a growing reliance on benefits. London is an outlier in the south, with 7.75% of our sample showing benefits reliance.
The new indicator has been developed to help organisations identify emerging hardship earlier, target support more effectively and monitor the impact of welfare reforms, labour market changes and wider economic shocks. It will be updated monthly, and can also be filtered by age group and income range.
Dougie Robb, DEO of Smart Data Foundry added “Too often, financial hardship only becomes visible once people reach crisis point. By showing where people’s incomes are supplemented by means-tested benefits in near real time, we can better understand the role these benefits play in supporting people’s living standards – and where financial vulnerability is building.
“That means organisations can better understand changing economic conditions and target support where it may be needed most, as well as evaluate policy changes much more quickly.”
The Benefits Reliance Indicator is available to all users of the Economic Wellbeing Explorer, alongside a companion aggregated research dataset in Smart Data Foundry’s secure research environment, MyFoundry. The Economic Wellbeing Explorer is free to access at national and regional level, with local-level data available on subscription. Organisations interested in understanding benefits reliance within their own local authority area can request a personalised walkthrough of the data and platform.
To support the launch, Smart Data Foundry will host a webinar on 26 May 2026 exploring the new indicator, emerging trends and practical applications for targeting interventions and tackling poverty.
Morgan Stanley appoints Angela McCann as Head of Glasgow office
Morgan Stanley today confirmed the appointment of Angela McCann as Head of Glasgow
In her new role, Angela will be responsible for overseeing Morgan Stanley’s Glasgow office, which supports a wide range of business functions and plays a key role in Morgan Stanley’s global operations. Having joined Morgan Stanley in 2006, she brings over two decades of experience across a broad range of Finance leadership positions.
In addition, Angela will continue to serve as Head of Glasgow Finance, a role she has held since 2022. She is also a senior champion of Morgan Stanley’s socio-economic inclusion strategy and serves on the Firm’s EMEA Inclusive & Sustainable Ventures Committee.
Angela McCann, Managing Director and Head of the Glasgow office, said“Glasgow has been an important part of my career, and having grown up in Scotland, it is a real privilege to take on this expanded role. The office plays an important role in supporting Morgan Stanley globally, and I look forward to building on the strong foundations already in place while continuing to invest in our people and the local community.”
Angela’s 20-year career with Morgan Stanley includes nine years in New York, where she held senior Finance roles and led key strategic initiatives within Corporate Tax.
Prior to joining Morgan Stanley, Angela worked for six years in financial management roles within the telecommunications sector across several international locations including the Philippines, Taiwan, Atlanta and Seattle. She is also a Chartered Certified Accountant (ACCA).
The AI Sovereignty Trap: Why UK Financial Services Are Sleepwalking Into It
By Nagu Gopalakrishnan, Co-founder, Vidai
Governance cannot live at the application layer for regulated platforms. I learnt that running regulatory engineering for the Ads Creative Infrastructure programmes at Amazon, taking us through EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act compliance, MiFID II‑grade regulation for large platforms, with penalties of up to 10% of global turnover. You either build a horizontal control plane that every product team inherits, or you spend the next five years putting out fires one integration at a time.
I am watching UK financial services make the second choice with AI right now. The regulators have already told them not to. And the economics of agentic AI will punish them for it before the regulators do.
The Problem Is Jurisdictional, Not Operational
Most conversations about AI vendor strategy in financial services frame the issue as cost or flexibility. Pick the right model. Negotiate the right rate. Avoid getting trapped on a single roadmap. These are real concerns, but they miss the deeper one.
Extraterritorial data laws are a fact of the cloud era. The US CLOUD Act is the most discussed example: it allows US authorities to compel any US‑headquartered provider to disclose customer data they hold anywhere in the world. Other jurisdictions have similar mechanisms. The relevant question for a UK‑regulated firm is not ‘which country?’ but ‘how many jurisdictions does my AI stack expose me to, and have I done it consciously?’.
Data residency clauses help less than they appear to. A contract with your UK‑region cloud provider has no force over the frontier model providers your applications then call into; those are separate contractual relationships, often with different jurisdictional anchors. The EU‑US Data Privacy Framework offers some cover for one specific corridor, but it has been struck down twice already and faces a credible third challenge.
For a UK firm serving Scottish or EU customers, every model API call sends data outside the protections that residency contracts negotiated — and across an agentic workflow, those calls compound into exposure most firms cannot quantify.
This is precisely the concentration risk the UK’s Critical Third Parties Regime (CTPR) was designed to confront. CTPR is, at its heart, about systemic dependencies on a small number of providers serving the financial system. A single AI provider handling AML triage, customer correspondence drafting, claims assessment or internal policy retrieval is the textbook example.
Agentic AI Makes It Worse and More Expensive
The shift to agentic AI changes this calculus by an order of magnitude. When a human asks a model a question, the data exposure is one prompt. When an agent runs a fifty‑step reasoning loop touching customer records, transaction history and internal policy documents, every step is a potential exposure path, and every step is a billable token.
Forrester predicts machine‑initiated traffic to financial institutions will surge by 40% by the end of 2026, while human visits drop by 20%. That is not a usage statistic. It is simultaneously a sovereignty exposure curve and a cost curve. Most current AI governance tooling was built for neither. Whether you are a tier‑1 bank, an insurer, an asset manager or a fintech selling into regulated buyers, the maths is the same.
The cost side of that curve is worth dwelling on. A workflow that costs pennies in pilot can cost five‑figure sums per day in production once the agents start chaining. Most finance teams in regulated firms were not staffed to forecast that, and most current AI tooling does not give them the visibility to try.
The dominant approach today is to bolt observability and policy enforcement into application‑side libraries written in Python or Node, designed for episodic human chat traffic. Under sustained machine‑to‑machine throughput, these layers do not fail loudly; they fail expensively. We benchmarked our Rust‑based control plane against a leading Python gateway on identical workloads, and we held up nearly double the throughput‑per‑core on hardware four generations older. The full methodology and source code are public at vidai.uk/blog/rust-python-vidai. The headline number matters less than what it implies: the architecture you choose for your governance layer determines whether multi‑model AI is economically viable at agentic scale, or whether it cannibalises your margins the moment traffic ramps.
The Control Plane Answer
A horizontal control plane, sitting between your applications and the models, should deliver governance across three axes — sovereignty, cost and compliance — and one engineering concession that makes adoption possible.
Sovereignty by design: Vidai runs entirely inside your VPC, deployed in minutes. No SaaS path, no phone‑home, no licence ping, no usage telemetry. We do not see your prompts, your responses or your timing. Your data, your control, your infrastructure. Egress is enforced inside the control plane: you decide what crosses to model providers and what does not, including from your own applications. That removes a class of third‑party dependency a SaaS gateway would add, and that CTPR would expect you to register
Cost governance: Real‑time, per‑team, per‑agent, per‑request, per‑workflow, per‑model spend is the floor. The ceiling is full historical lineage of how pricing changed over time. When a provider shifts rates mid‑year, your finance team can see what the same workload would have cost under the old pricing, what it costs now and what it would cost if re‑routed. Cost‑based routing then closes the loop, sending each workload to whichever provider is cheapest for that latency profile at that moment, not whichever vendor has the lowest headline rate.
Compliance governance: A single security and compliance review covers every model behind the control plane, with full request and response retention for regulatory inspection. Adding a new provider becomes a configuration change, not a six‑month procurement cycle. The ‘sign‑off tax’ that pushes regulated firms towards single‑vendor lock‑in disappears.
A drop‑in path, not a re‑platforming project: Most gateways force engineering teams into an OpenAI‑compatible shape, which means every team using Anthropic, Bedrock or Google native SDKs has to refactor before they can join the control plane or add an additional application‑side library. Vidai sits transparently in front of whatever SDK is already in production. Joining the control plane is a base URL change, not a sprint. That single design choice is often the difference between a multi‑model strategy that ships this quarter and one that lives in a slide deck for two years.
This is what we are building at Vidai, from Scotland, with a team whose backgrounds span hyperscale EU regulatory navigation and national critical infrastructure resilience. The combination is deliberate. The next decade of financial AI will be defined less by which model wins and more by who governs the substrate the models run through.
The Choice for UK Financial Leaders
The UK has a window here that will not stay open for long. CTPR is live. DORA is live. The Bank of England, FCA and PRA are all signalling that AI concentration risk is moving up the supervisory agenda. The firms that build their multi‑model strategy now, on a sovereign control plane they actually own, will be ahead of the requirement when it lands. The firms that wait will be retrofitting under regulatory pressure, on someone else’s timeline.
The goal is not to pick the winning AI model. It is to build the infrastructure that lets you use any winning model without losing control of your data, your budget or your sovereignty.
That is a decision that gets made at the architecture layer, not the application layer. And it gets made now, or it gets made for you.
Localising for North America: Lessons for Scottish Fintechs
By Atlantic Fintech
Expanding into North America is a natural next step for many ambitious Scottish fintechs. The market is large, sophisticated, and innovation-friendly – but it is not a single, unified landscape. Success depends less on scaling what already works at home, and more on adapting thoughtfully across product, language, and market expectations.
At Atlantic Fintech, we’ve worked closely with fintechs on both sides of the Atlantic. A consistent theme emerges: localisation is not a final step – it’s strategy from day one.
North America Is Not One Market
One of the most common misconceptions is treating North America as a single, homogeneous opportunity. In reality, it is a patchwork of regulatory environments, consumer behaviors, and financial systems.
- Canada and the U.S. operate under different regulatory frameworks, with further variation at the provincial and state levels.
- Payments infrastructure differs significantly (for example, Interac in Canada versus ACH and card-heavy systems in the U.S.).
- Procurement cycles, especially in financial institutions, tend to be longer and more relationship-driven than in the UK.
For Scottish fintechs, this means market entry should start with a clear geographic focus rather than a continent-wide approach.
Product Localisation: Beyond Compliance
Adapting your product for North America goes well beyond regulatory compliance. It requires aligning with local user expectations and financial habits.
- Integrate with region-specific payment rails and financial data systems.
- Reflect local financial terminology and user flows (e.g., “checking account” vs. “current account”).
- Ensure your product aligns with local security expectations and trust signals, which can vary by market.
An example: a fintech offering open banking-enabled services in the UK may need to rethink its data access strategy in North America, where open banking frameworks are still evolving and often rely on different providers and standards.
Language and Communication Nuances
Even in English-speaking markets, language localisation matters more than many expect. Subtle differences in tone, terminology, and messaging can affect credibility and conversion.
- North American audiences tend to prefer more direct, benefits-driven messaging.
- Marketing content often leans less on understatement and more on clarity and value proposition.
- Bilingual requirements – particularly in Canada – add another layer. French is not optional in Québec and can strengthen brand trust nationally.
For Scottish fintechs, this is less about translation and more about transcreation: ensuring your message resonates culturally, not just linguistically.
Finding Product-Market Fit
Product-market fit in North America often requires iteration, even for well-established companies.
- Customer expectations around onboarding, UX, and support can differ significantly.
- Enterprise buyers may expect local presence, partnerships, or pilots before committing.
- Pricing models may need adjustment to align with local purchasing norms and budgets.
Partnerships can be a powerful accelerator. Collaborating with local fintech ecosystems, financial institutions, or innovation hubs can provide faster access to networks and insights.
A Note on Atlantic Canada
While Toronto and New York often dominate conversations about North American fintech, Atlantic Canada offers a compelling – and often overlooked – entry point. Atlantic Canada can serve as an effective “soft landing” zone for international fintechs. It allows companies to test, adapt, and refine their North American strategy in a more agile and supportive setting before scaling into larger markets.
The region also shares many similarities with Scotland: a growing fintech sector made up of over 150 ambitious fintechs, strong ecosystem support from government and industry, and a collaborative, community-driven approach to innovation. Scottish companies looking for a familiar yet globally connected environment can benefit from:
- Close-knit fintech and startup ecosystems that enable faster relationship-building.
- Lower operational costs compared to major financial centres.
- Direct access to both North American and European markets through strong trade ties and cultural alignment.
Building for Scale Through Localisation
The most successful fintechs entering North America are those that treat localisation as a growth lever, not a constraint. They invest early in understanding regional differences, build adaptable products, and engage deeply with local ecosystems.
For Scottish fintechs, there is a strong foundation to build on: a reputation for innovation, strong regulatory understanding, and a global outlook. By pairing these strengths with a deliberate localisation strategy, North America becomes not just accessible – but highly scalable.
About Atlantic Fintech
Atlantic Fintech drives fintech innovation and growth across Atlantic Canada’s four provinces: New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador. The organization builds a global fintech community by providing startups and scaling fintech companies with strategic connections, industry expertise, and market entry resources. Atlantic Fintech focuses on fostering collaboration and positioning Atlantic Canada as a recognized fintech hub of international relevance.
Atlantic Fintech offers tailored growth programs, specialized mentorship and go-to-market support. Having developed a strong ecosystem that integrates local talent with global fintech markets, leaders praise the community’s growth opportunities, strategic introductions, and educational events that empower companies to compete worldwide and build sustainable fintech ventures.
NatWest becomes first UK bank to launch home-buying guidance in ChatGPT
Users can now explore buying or re-mortgaging options within one of the world’s most used AI platforms.
On 30 April, NatWest Group has announced that it has become the first UK bank to offer an app in ChatGPT, providing NatWest-specific home-buying and re-mortgage guidance. This marks a new way for consumers to access trusted information and begin their home-buying journey and is an important step as NatWest continues to invest in technology and AI to meet customers’ evolving needs.
NatWest now appears in the ChatGPT app store alongside well-known platforms such as Rightmove and MoneySuperMarket. This means customers and non-customers can add and tag the bank in a query to receive NatWest‑specific mortgage and home‑buying guidance without having to leave the platform. Users will then be signposted to NatWest-owned channels to take the next steps, including to access specialist advice, appointments for colleague support or digital mortgage applications.
Consumers can explore their mortgage options and support decision-making in a more personalised way, with ChatGPT drawing on publicly available NatWest APIs to calculate how much they could borrow, test affordability and deposit scenarios, and receive tailored mortgage rates. By sharing details such as their income and monthly outgoings, users can receive responses grounded in real numbers, returning to the conversation later as their circumstances or questions evolve.
Conversations within the app are clearly branded as NatWest, so customers understand when they are receiving responses from the bank.
Solange Chamberlain, Retail CEO, NatWest Group said: “As technology and AI open up new ways for people to access information and think about their finances, NatWest is focused on meeting customer needs by showing up in the right places at the right time.
Buying a home is a major financial decision, and we want to support those early mortgage planning conversations wherever they may take place. By bringing trusted NatWest mortgage guidance directly into ChatGPT, we’re giving consumers more choice in how they explore their options in a more personalised and accessible way.”
NatWest continues to transform the digital mortgage experience and currently leads the market with the largest flow of digital new business. This builds on its recent partnership and integration with Rightmove, that sees Natwest provide home buyers with an instant fully digital NatWest mortgage decision in principle when applying through Rightmove, enabling customers to then complete their full application online.
Modulr and Sardine partner to bring real-time, AI-enabled fraud detection to automated payments
Sardine, the leading agentic risk platform to fight financial crime, today announced a partnership with Modulr, the payments automation platform built to scale. Through the partnership, Sardine will support Modulr with a suite of integrated fraud and anti-money laundering (AML) solutions.
The integration, as part of Modulr’s broader investment in financial crime and risk management capabilities, enables Modulr to leverage Sardine’s platform to detect and stop financial crime across card and real-time payment rails, while strengthening AML compliance and operational controls as the business scales. It is integrated into Modulr’s Risk & Compliance Hub – a connected set of tools and infrastructure that spans the entire customer lifecycle and is built to protect customers, reduce friction, and prevent financial crime.
Businesses are increasingly expected to move money instantly, yet many fraud and AML systems were built for slower settlement cycles and manual investigation workflows. By integrating Sardine’s risk platform directly into its payment infrastructure, Modulr is able to leverage the latest technology to prevent and manage financial crime.
“Real-time payments fundamentally change how fraud and AML needs to be managed,” said Soups Ranjan, CEO and Co-Founder of Sardine. “When funds move instantly, risk decisions need to happen just as quickly. Modulr’s platform delivers critical capability for automated payments, and we’re excited to help ensure those payment flows remain secure as they scale.”
“For Modulr to provide our customers with the ability to run mission-critical finance operations accurately and at scale, we need strong compliance that gives peace of mind without adding friction – which is why we are partnering with tools like Sardine, and building a Risk & Compliance Hub that monitors every step of the customer journey to prevent financial crime,” said Ben Taylor, Chief Operating Officer at Modulr. “For our customers, that translates to streamlined and low-friction onboarding, a better money movement experience, and crime prevention infrastructure that keeps pace as their business grows.”
Modulr’s payments automation platform streamlines money movement with greater accuracy, control and reliability – built to scale and powering use cases across payroll, supplier payments, lending, and travel. Sardine backs that network with a track record of protecting over $1T in transaction volume across a global customer base of enterprises and financial institutions. Sardine also operates the fastest growing fraud data consortium, spanning more than 5.5 billion devices, 670 million consumers, and 2.8 million businesses. By protecting funds across some of the highest risk industries in financial services, Sardine gains early visibility into emerging fraud patterns. That intelligence helps Modulr’s customers stay ahead of evolving threats.
Winning in APAC: Five Common Mistakes WealthTech Firms Make – and What Actually Works
By Patrick Donaldson, Founder, Mkt Dev APAC with Steven Carroll, Founder, CCAS
After a recent visit to Glasgow and Edinburgh, and a good conversation with Aleks Tomczyk, Chief Executive at FinTech Scotland, it struck me how many fintechs based in Scotland are starting to look seriously at Asia-Pacific (APAC) regional expansion – often with limited on-the-ground experience. The mistakes I describe below come from what I have watched play out with firms entering APAC from major wealth and financial centres in Europe and North America over the past decade. The patterns are consistent, and the underlying discipline travels.
I have spent close to three decades on both sides of financial technology – eighteen years as a wealth management practitioner at firms like Barclays Wealth (originally at Greig Middleton stockbrokers in Edinburgh), then eleven years on the vendor side at Thomson Reuters, Refinitiv and LSEG, building commercial businesses across APAC. I now run Mkt Dev APAC from Singapore, helping firms from outside the region design and execute the right entry strategy for APAC markets.
My lens is WealthTech, and that is where my direct experience sits. Many of the patterns travel across other fintech verticals – payments, regtech, lending, data – but I will speak to what I know. This is written for founders and commercial leaders of Scottish WealthTech firms who are starting to take APAC seriously.
Here are the five most common mistakes I see, and the playbook that actually works.
The opportunity is real – but it isn’t free
APAC is the fastest-growing wealth management region in the world. Private capital is flowing into Singapore and Hong Kong at scale, family offices are multiplying, and the region’s private banks and wealth platforms are investing heavily in technology to serve an increasingly sophisticated client base. The numbers vary by report, but the direction of travel is unambiguous.
That opportunity has also drawn a lot of entrants. Many of them will fail. Not because the market rejects them – because they arrived with the wrong plan.
From Edinburgh or London, it is tempting to see “APAC” as one more region on the sales dashboard. On the ground, it behaves like multiple distinct markets that reward discipline and punish generic expansion.
Common mistake #1: Treating APAC as a single market
APAC isn’t a country and it doesn’t behave as a single go-to-market region. Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, Thailand and Malaysia all have different regulators, different buyer cultures and different languages. A playbook that works in Singapore won’t land in Tokyo. A distribution partner who opens doors in Hong Kong may have no relevant network in Kuala Lumpur.
The firms that win pick a beachhead – usually Singapore, for reasons I’ll come to – prove the model, then expand. The firms that fail hire a “VP APAC” and set them loose on a map.
Common mistake #2: Selling instead of listening
Too many WealthTech firms arrive in APAC with a deck and a demo. They assume the product that’s selling well in London or New York will translate, and that the job is to pitch it harder.
It won’t, and it isn’t.
The most effective first move for any senior leader entering APAC is to come and listen. Meet the buyers – the heads of technology at the private banks, the CIOs at the External Asset Managers (EAMs), the principals of the family offices, the heads of digital at the regional challengers – and ask them what their actual problems are before you tell them what you sell. Most of what’s needed to win comes out of those conversations. It isn’t expensive; it just requires discipline.
Common mistake #3: Hiring a Head of APAC too early – or managing it remotely from London or New York
These are two sides of the same mistake, and I see both regularly.
Hiring a “Head of APAC” as your first move commits you to £280-320k all-in before you know whether the market wants your product. It’s the wrong sequence. Start with an advisory relationship – someone who knows the buyers, understands the regulation, and can get you ten qualified meetings in ninety days. Validate product-market fit first, then hire to scale what’s working.The other side of the same coin: trying to run APAC from London or New York. You can’t. The time zones don’t work, the cultural distance is real, and the buyers here know when they’re dealing with a part-time effort. If APAC matters, it needs real local presence. If it doesn’t matter enough to fund that, don’t start.
Common mistake #4: Misreading the APAC buying culture
Two features of the APAC buying culture differ meaningfully from the UK and European pattern, and firms that miss them stall.
First, conflict-of-interest sensitivity runs higher than most vendors expect. Post the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) scandal and under active MAS (Monetary Authority of Singapore) scrutiny, APAC private banks and family offices are genuinely wary of arrangements that blur commercial incentives. Transparent, independent fee structures – advisory retainers, project-based pricing, introduction fees – land better than opaque commission-linked models.
If your model depends on back-door commissions or informal revenue-sharing, you should assume it will be challenged early in the process.
Second, APAC buyers expect shorter time-to-value. Internal implementation teams at private banks and EAMs tend to be leaner than at their UK equivalents, so plug-and-play integration via APIs matters more than beautifully designed roadmaps. A product that can prove value in a ninety-day pilot gets traction where one that requires a twelve-month implementation programme does not.
For Scottish WealthTech firms, this often means simplifying the initial offer: focus on a sharply defined use case you can implement quickly, then expand once you have proved value.
Common mistake #5: Generic pitching
This sounds obvious but almost nobody does it well. Understand which firms are struggling with which problems before you walk in. A generic “here’s our platform” presentation dies in APAC. A targeted “here’s how we solve the exact issue your Head of Wealth Technology raised at last month’s conference” gets you a second meeting.
The research isn’t hard. Industry events, public filings, LinkedIn activity from senior leaders, regional press coverage – it’s all there. Most firms just don’t do the work.
A word on regulation
Every WealthTech firm entering APAC needs to think carefully about its regulatory posture. The first question is whether you are a vendor selling to regulated firms, or whether your product itself will require licensing. The second is easy to miss: even unregulated vendors carry real regulatory obligations, because their customers are regulated and pass compliance requirements through to suppliers via outsourcing, third-party risk and data rules. MAS in particular has detailed expectations here.
Singapore’s MAS and Hong Kong’s SFC both run sophisticated, generally pro-innovation licensing frameworks covering capital markets services, payment services, digital advisors and fund management. Both regulators are accessible – MAS’s FinTech Innovation Lab and sandbox routes are genuine, and UK firms are welcomed – but neither is a tick-box exercise.
I am not a regulatory specialist, and this is not the place for a rule-by-rule guide. But two practical rules hold: understand which bucket you fall into before you build a market entry plan, and budget time and expertise to get it right. Getting it wrong can add six to twelve months.
What actually works
The positive version of all of the above is a short, practical playbook:
- Send your CRO to listen first. Before you hire anyone, before you build a deck, before you commit to a strategy, have your senior commercial leader spend a week in Singapore and Hong Kong meeting buyers. What you hear in those conversations is worth more than any consultant’s report.
- Start in Singapore. For most B2B WealthTech, it’s the region’s regulated hub, has the highest concentration of private banks, EAMs, family offices and regional headquarters, and is genuinely welcoming to fintech innovation. Use Singapore as your beachhead, not your only market.
- Budget realistically for the listen-and-validate phase. Between travel, local presence, regulatory work and relationship building, budget £100-250k for the first year of serious effort. This is the phase before a permanent senior hire – the hire itself follows once you have validated product-market fit and know what you are scaling.
- Use the government support available. Both the Singapore and UK sides offer meaningful market-entry support for fintechs, including grants that can offset a material share of overseas expansion costs. For FinTech Scotland members in particular, it is worth a conversation with both the UK’s trade and investment bodies in Singapore and Singapore’s own enterprise development agencies before you commit capital. This kind of support is not a substitute for commercial discipline – but it can materially reduce the cost of the listen-and-validate phase.
- Find an APAC market entry consultant. For most Scottish WealthTech firms, the right first step in-region is a specialist market entry consultant rather than a full-time “Head of APAC”. Someone who understands both APAC wealth managers and the vendor landscape can help you avoid obvious missteps, pressure-test your assumptions and quickly tell you whether your product-market fit is realistic.
- Lead with the augmented-advisor story. The strongest WealthTech narrative in APAC right now is productivity – automating low-value tasks so advisors can focus on high-value relationship work. APAC wealth firms run tight margins; anything that demonstrably improves advisor productivity gets budget approval faster than almost anything else.
Final thought
Winning in APAC isn’t about planting a flag – it’s about building relationships, understanding local nuance, and having the patience and local knowledge to do it right. For WealthTech firms serious about the region, the opportunity is enormous. But so is the cost of getting it wrong.
For FinTech Scotland members, the difference between “we tried Asia once” and a durable APAC business is rarely product. It is sequencing, listening, and committing to a real local presence.
If you’re a FinTech Scotland member thinking about APAC and want to talk it through, the team at FinTech Scotland can make an introduction – or reach me directly. I’m always happy to share a first view.
Patrick Donaldson is the founder of Mkt Dev APAC (https://mktdevapac.com), a WealthTech advisory consultancy helping companies from outside the region enter APAC markets. Based in Singapore, Patrick has close to three decades of experience across wealth management and financial technology, including senior commercial leadership roles at Thomson Reuters, Refinitiv and LSEG.
Steven Carroll is the founder of CCAS (Carroll Consulting and Advisory Services – https://ccas.tech), a specialist consultancy supporting information services and financial services firms on product, sales and marketing strategy. Based in London, Steven and Patrick previously collaborated on Winning in APAC: A WealthTech Perspective, from which this guest blog is adapted.
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.
Mydex
Every Life Moment Is a Money Moment
By Dia Banerji, Founder and CEO, Cherpa.ai
Separation. Redundancy. Having a baby. Losing a parent. Caring for an ageing relative. Retiring.
Every one of these moments comes with money questions. And for most people, those questions arrive at exactly the wrong time, when you are stressed, stretched, and trying to hold the rest of life together.
In some ways, I have been trying to make money simpler for people my whole career. I spent over 20 years in financial services, building products, shaping propositions, and working with customers at scale. I saw the best of what our industry can do, and I also saw a pattern that kept repeating.
The people who need help most are often the least likely to get it.
Not because they are not capable. Not because they are not trying. But because the industry still expects people to work out what they need, hunt it down across multiple sources, and then stitch it together for themselves, translating generic education into decisions that make sense for their own lives, often in the very moments they have the least capacity to do so.
The problem is not knowledge, it is design
Financial services impact everyone and it should work for everyone.
Yet the experience most people have is fragmented and exhausting. One app for budgeting. Another for savings. Another for pensions. Another for benefits. Another for insurance. Each tool does something useful in isolation, but real life does not arrive in neat categories.
If you are going through a separation, you might need to rethink your mortgage, update your pension beneficiary, understand what help exists for short term bills, and decide what to tackle first. Those are connected questions, but our tools split them into separate journeys, leaving the person to join the dots. We assume information equals empowerment. Too often it is just cognitive load, and when life is already full, it becomes disengagement rather than better decisions.
The same is true for financial education. The industry has invested heavily in it, and rightly so, but it is usually delivered at a distance from real life, generic, broad, and rarely anchored to the moment someone is actually living through. It tells you what people like you should think about, not what it means for you, right now, in your specific situation.
And if the choice is between a webinar on pension consolidation and the next season of Bridgerton, I know which one I am choosing, and I have worked in pension!
People do not need more content. They need clarity.
The advice gap, and the missing middle
There is another layer to this. Regulated advice is essential for big, complex decisions. But most everyday money questions are not asking for a product recommendation. They are asking for direction, options, and reassurance.
People want to know things like:
- What support can I access right now
- What should I change first
- What am I missing
- What is the “obvious” thing that everyone else seems to know
Often the most valuable intervention is not a recommendation. It is connecting the dots.
Before we built anything, we surveyed people about money confidence. Nine in ten told us they could improve. Many said they feel anxious just thinking about their finances. A meaningful number said they do not seek help from anyone at all. And the words people used stuck with me:
“I don’t need a PhD in financial products. Just tell me what’s relevant to me.”
“My budgeting app shames me for buying a coffee. Too many apps, too little help.”
“Make me feel safe asking stupid questions.”
That last line matters more than it seems. Because the real barrier is often emotional. Shame, fear of getting it wrong, fear of being judged, fear of being sold to, fear of admitting you do not understand.
What should the future feel like
I believe we are entering a new era of financial support. One where the default experience is not search, not generic content, and not a cold handoff into a process designed for specialists.
The future should feel more like this:
One front door. A conversation. Your life context. The options that matter to you.
Not to replace regulated advice, and not to turn every question into a product journey. Instead, to help people navigate the messy, human moments where money is involved, which is most moments.
To do that well, three things have to change.
First, we have to start from life moments, not financial categories. Life is the organising system. The tools should follow.
Second, we have to make information genuinely usable. That means connecting it, prioritising it, and presenting it in plain language, with next steps that feel doable.
Third, we have to treat trust and privacy as design requirements, not legal footnotes. Many people are understandably reluctant to share bank data with a new app.
Building a new front door to financial support
Cherpa exists to meet people right where they are. When life changes, money questions do not arrive neatly labelled. They arrive tangled, emotional, and urgent, and yet we still ask people to navigate a maze of tools, terminology, and generic content.
So we are taking a different approach. We start where real life starts, with the moment, not the product. One conversation that helps someone orient quickly, join the dots across the areas that matter, and move from noise to a clear set of options and next steps. The ambition is to create a trusted front door, a place people can begin, without needing to hand over more data than they are comfortable sharing.
That shift, from fear to agency, is the outcome I care about.
Why this is personal
I lost my dad when I was fourteen. I watched my mum try to navigate a financial system that gave her no useful answers during the hardest moment of her life. That memory has never left me.
It is one thing to know, intellectually, that help exists. It is another to live the reality of not being able to find it, understand it, or know what applies to you.
That is why I keep coming back to this belief.
Every life moment is a money moment. And nobody should have to face them alone.
Dia Banerji is the Founder and CEO of Cherpa.ai, based in Edinburgh.