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.
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.
Remittance Isn’t Broken. The Outcome Is
By Ayodeji Jegede – Co-Founder, MoneyHive
This article represents my independent perspective as a founder, separate from my employed role. It is published by FinTech Scotland, the recognised industry body for Scottish fintech.
For over a decade, remittance has been framed as a problem of efficiency. Faster payments. Lower fees. Better FX. And to a large extent, the industry has delivered. Global remittance flows exceeded $850 billion, with the UK consistently ranking among the top outbound corridors. Yet despite this scale and maturity, the user experience remains fundamentally incomplete. Because the real problem doesn’t sit in the movement of money. It sits in what happens after.
Remittance is rarely the end goal. It is a means to an outcome: rent needs to be paid, school fees need to be settled, electricity needs to be restored, healthcare needs to be delivered. But once money is sent, the system effectively stops. There is no standardised way to confirm that a bill was actually paid, verify that a service was delivered, or track the outcome beyond “delivered.” This creates a structural disconnect between financial infrastructure and real-world execution. The transaction succeeds. The outcome remains uncertain. That gap is where trust erodes.
Why the Current Model Plateaus
The dominant competitive levers in remittance are now commoditised. Speed is near instant. Fees are compressing. FX margins are increasingly transparent. This creates a ceiling. Incremental improvements in these areas no longer translate into meaningful differentiation. More importantly, they do not solve the user’s core anxiety: “Did what I sent actually get done?” This is not a payments problem. It is a completion problem.
The next phase of fintech in this space will not be defined by better rails. It will be defined by what sits on top of them. Three layers are emerging: outcome assurance (systems that confirm completion of the intended action), embedded verification (direct integrations with service providers like utilities, schools and healthcare), and trust as infrastructure (status and proof becoming core product features). This reframes the core question from “Was the payment successful?” to “Was the responsibility fulfilled?”
What We’re Building at MoneyHive
At MoneyHive, we are building around this shift. Not how to move money, but how to ensure money delivers outcomes. This changes product design at a fundamental level: payments become infrastructure not the product, status tracking becomes real‑time and structured, proof of completion becomes a default expectation, and recurring obligations become programmable. The result is not just a financial service. It is a coordination layer between diaspora users and real‑world services back home.
Outside of my employment, MoneyHive has achieved independent validation. We were accepted into Microsoft for Startups, earning $!00,000 in credits (April 2026), a competitive global program. Our application to the FCA Regulatory Sandbox is under assessment with a case officer assigned. We have built an organic waitlist of more than a quarter of 1000 diaspora users from the UK‑Nigeria corridor. MoneyHive is an active member of the FinTech Scotland community and has been accepted into the Techscaler Catalyst programme, a Scottish Government backed accelerator.
Starting in the UK to Nigeria corridor, a few patterns are becoming clear. Users are less sensitive to marginal FX gains than assumed. Visibility consistently outperforms price as a trust driver. Repeat usage is driven by certainty, not convenience. In other words, the strongest retention loop is not “This was cheap and fast.” It is “This worked exactly as expected, and I can rely on it again.” That distinction matters because it defines where long‑term value sits.
Why This Matters for the UK and Scotland
The UK is one of the most important remittance hubs globally, both in volume and diversity of corridors. At the same time, ecosystems like Scotland are increasingly positioning themselves at the intersection of fintech innovation, data infrastructure and cross‑sector collaboration. This creates a unique opportunity because solving for outcomes in remittance is not purely a payments challenge. It requires coordination across financial services, utilities and service providers, identity and verification systems, and regulatory frameworks. This is where ecosystems, not just startups, become critical. The companies that succeed will not operate in isolation. They will plug into networks.
The remittance market is large. But more importantly, it is mis defined. It has been optimised around movement, when it should be optimised around completion. That leaves a significant layer of value unaddressed. The opportunity is not to build another way to send money. It is to build systems that ensure something meaningful happens because of it.
Closing Thought
Remittance has always been framed as a financial transaction. In reality, it is a coordination problem between people, money and outcomes. The industry solved the movement of money. It has not yet solved the delivery of intent. The next generation of fintech companies will. And when they do, the question will no longer be “How fast did the money arrive?” It will be “Did it do what it was supposed to do?” That is where trust is built. And where the next wave of value will come from.
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/
Finance and Health Lab National Conference
On 19 March, FinTech Scotland hosted the Finance and Health Lab (FHL) National Conference at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, marking the completion of Phase 1 of this programme. The event brought together leaders from financial services, fintech, academia, government, healthcare, and the third sector to share learning from academia, industry, and from the Lab’s first Innovation Stimulation Open Call and to explore the future of financial wellbeing in an ageing society.
The Finance and Health Lab was established to address a growing reality: as populations age, financial health and physical health become increasingly interconnected. Changes in income, housing, care needs, cognitive capacity, and social circumstances create complex challenges that sit across multiple systems. No single sector can address these alone. FHL was designed to catalyse collaboration, evidence-led innovation, and practical experimentation to improve outcomes for people in later life.
Setting the Context
The conference opened with reflections on the programme’s purpose and progress to date. Discussions on the implications of demographic change highlighted both the scale of the challenge and the opportunity for innovation. An ageing society is not simply a policy issue. It reshapes how financial services must operate, how products are designed, and how support is delivered across the life course.
A research showcase featuring leading academics explored the evolving relationship between health and wealth in later life. The evidence underscores that financial insecurity and poor health often reinforce one another, yet services are rarely designed with this interplay in mind. Bringing rigorous research into direct dialogue with industry practitioners is a core objective of the Lab.
Designing Future-Ready Services
An industry panel examined what it will take to build financial services that remain effective as customers age. Trust, accessibility, and long-term resilience emerged as central themes.
Participants highlighted the need to move beyond reactive support models toward proactive approaches that anticipate vulnerability and support people through major life transitions.
Importantly, the discussion recognised that innovation in this space must balance commercial sustainability with public benefit. Aligning these objectives is challenging but essential if solutions are to scale.
Showcasing Innovation
The afternoon sessions highlighted solutions developed through the Innovation Stimulation Open Call. Participating startups delivered rapid demonstrations of tools and platforms addressing issues such as financial vulnerability, planning for later life, support for carers, and accessible digital services. Follow-up discussions allowed founders to engage directly with industry stakeholders and policymakers.
A session led by Smart Data Foundry demonstrated how responsibly governed data can generate new insights into the links between financial behaviour and broader social determinants of wellbeing. This work illustrates the potential for data to support more targeted interventions while maintaining public trust.
Collaboration in Practice
Throughout the day, one message was clear: progress in this space depends on sustained collaboration. The Lab has created a structured environment for organisations that do not typically work together to share expertise, test ideas, and identify barriers to implementation.
Beyond the formal sessions, the conference enabled valuable informal engagement among senior leaders across sectors. These conversations are critical for building the partnerships required to translate early innovation into real-world impact.
Key Insights from Phase 1
The closing discussion reflected on what the programme has demonstrated so far:
- Financial health in later life is a systemic issue requiring cross-sector solutions
- Evidence, lived experience, and innovation must be integrated from the outset
- Trust, accessibility, and dignity are foundational design principles
- Data can unlock new approaches when used responsibly
- There is strong appetite across industry and public services to continue this work
Phase 1 has shown that structured collaboration can move beyond dialogue to tangible experimentation and learning.
Looking Forward
The National Conference marked an important milestone, but not an endpoint. The insights, partnerships, and prototypes developed through the Finance and Health Lab provide a foundation for future phases of activity.
FinTech Scotland remains committed to working with partners to advance solutions that support healthier, more financially secure lives as people age. The challenges are significant, but so is the opportunity to redesign systems around real human needs.
Phase 1 has demonstrated what is possible when diverse sectors come together with a shared purpose. The next stage will focus on deepening this work and translating innovation into scalable impact.
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.
Should GPs and banks be talking to one another? Definitely, say academics
For decades, health and finance research has been done in isolation. Yet, the challenges we face in these areas are often interconnected – especially as we live longer. With patient consent, an unlikely partnership between GPs and banks could spot warning signs earlier, cut through stigma, and unlock vital support.
The search is now on for compelling evidence to show that data sharing is viable and that current innovation can benefit everyone, with risk monitoring, transparency and consent at the core.
Read the latest article from the Finance & Health Lab by downloading the PDF.
Lab Read Editor: Margot Wilson
Journalists: Isabel Woodford and Callum Clark
Designer: Nikita Steinberg
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.
Behind the Scenes at the Skills Academy
“When you look across financial services, the message is the same everywhere: the pace of technological change is relentless, and people and industry need to keep up,” explains Christine Sinclair, Programme Director for FRIL.
And that is exactly what sits behind the FRIL Skills Academy – a pioneering, demand-led, skills and education platform created by the Financial Regulation Innovation Lab (FRIL).
“With the speed of change, the biggest risk is to do nothing,” adds Christine.
The Academy is delivered in partnership between Fintech Scotland and the University of Strathclyde and the University of Glasgow. It is a practical response to real skills gaps identified across the sector from work within FRIL’s Innovation Calls and research.
The academy, which launched officially in January, brings together a portfolio of short courses, microcredentials (which gain academic credits), and executive education that help people across financial services and beyond to understand, adopt and apply new technologies responsibly and effectively.
So, that’s the context. But what are people actually learning at the Academy, and what difference does it make?
Here, we explore the stories of several participants to find out:
Closing the gap, accelerating progress
Professor Mick O’Connor started his working life as an apprentice welder in the Clyde shipyards and is now a serial entrepreneur, academic and managing director of multiple high‑tech businesses spanning regtech, spaceports and drones. When Mick’s regulatory technology firm Haelo won one of FRIL’s first Innovation Calls, he was already building AI-enabled solutions. But as we often find, the more we learn, the more we realise we need to learn.
“I’d never been formally taught AI,” he says. “I’m not a coder. I had an enthusiastic amateur understanding, but I owed it to myself and the business to understand more.”
So, he enrolled in the AI and Regulatory Technology in Financial Compliance microcredential at the University of Glasgow.
“I still wouldn’t describe myself as an AI expert,” he explains. “But I can now talk comfortably with people who are. I can translate the customer problem into user stories, and then into technical requirements.”
And this has helped Mick bring together the business and technical teams required to make the Haelo magic happen.
“We talked different languages. This has helped close that gap,” he explains.
And while the gap may have narrowed, Haelo’s trajectory has accelerated.
“As a direct consequence of FRIL, I developed a technology roadmap. I didn’t have that before. I started with the problems then understood the technology I needed to solve them.”
Haelo is now preparing to launch its first product, designed to be sector-agnostic, capable of pivoting across highly regulated industries including pharma, rail, nuclear, space and aviation.
“I’ve said to FinTech Scotland that this is such a great story,” he reflects. “I can demonstrate that the whole genesis of that product and building the business has been seeded by FRIL.”
Joining the dots between rockets and regulation
“My job is business development,” says Derek Harris. “I need to understand what my clients are doing, especially around satellite launching. These courses helped me have that conversation.”
Derek is Director of Business Development and Communications at Skyrora, which builds small launch vehicles for launching satellites into space.
You might not associate the FRIL Sklls Academy as an enabler for the Space industry but the sectors intersect in surprising ways.
Satellites may orbit the earth, but their impact is grounded in everyday systems: encryption, cybersecurity, data protection, which is also the invisible infrastructure behind banking and digital security.
And similarly, Derek’s career has bridged those two worlds. Before rockets, he spent 15 years in financial services.”
“When it comes to Space and Finance, we have one of the biggest finance areas outside London and Frankfurt. But we also now have a fully forming space industry where the two can work hand in hand.
“So, if we can identify what data is required by financial institutions, these courses can help turn wish lists into actual products,” he explains.
Micro-credentials in AI Implementation and Financial Crime Prevention gave him a structured understanding of how space-enabled data connects with financial regulation and risk.
“These courses helped me fill in the dots,” explains Derek.
And it wasn’t just what was being taught that was helpful, it was the way it was being taught too.
For someone who is dyslexic, the flexible online format was crucial.
“I could go back, relook, learn at my own pace, even while on the go and in between flights. I could jump online and do 30 minutes. That made a huge difference,” explains Derek.
And his biggest surprise about the Academy? “It’s not as well-known as it should be,” says Derek.
“If all the banks were doing this, it would be a game changer. And it’s the customers who would win at the end of the day.”
Confidence to challenge and connect
“The Digital Transformation course brought learning to life with real-world examples, group work and problem-solving,” says Joanne Seagrave, founder of Norwood Risk and Compliance, who offers yet another perspective on the Academy’s impact.
“As a result, I felt empowered to grow my scope within the fintech community, which inspired me to develop my role as a board advisor to start-ups.”
With 25 years in financial services and experience supporting fintechs through FRIL as an industry partner, she joined the course not out of necessity, but curiosity.
“I wanted to take my understanding to a more in-depth level,” she says.
The micro-credentials allowed her to explore business strategy through a technology-led lens, from generative AI to distributed ledger technology, grounding innovation in commercial and regulatory realities.
“The course gave me confidence to be curious,” she explains. “Whether that means challenging compliance teams to use technology more effectively or factoring risk in at the early stages of a project.”
What surprised her most was the diversity of the cohort.
“I’ve worked in financial services for over 25 years, but the community included people from charities, engineering, life sciences, public sector and software development, which made for some interesting discussions and led to diversity of thought,” she explains.
Shaping the future… and your future
So that’s a glimpse behind the scenes of the Academy and the programmes on offer. But let’s leave the final word around its impact to Christine:
“There are so many inspiring stories from people who’ve been through these programmes,” she says. “One participant told us he’d never been to college or university. He went straight into work and never had the opportunity to study formally. He was the first person in his family to take a university course, and it was our Digital Transformation programme.”
“Something clicked for him. After completing the course, he asked what else he could do. He’s now enrolled on a graduate apprenticeship degree. Another participant has gone on to apply for an MBA. So, these short courses aren’t just about skills, they can genuinely spark lifelong learning.”
“Short courses are powerful,” she adds. “They can change the course of someone’s career.”
If you’ve liked what you’ve read and would like to change the course of your career, then please check out the FRIL Skills Academy webpage. Or contact the Skills Team for more information at sbs-fril@strath.ac.uk. They are waiting to hear from you.
About FRIL
Research in Action – How Financial Regulation Innovation Lab (FRIL) Is Turning Insight into Impact for Industry and Consumers
FRIL is turning collaborative research into real-world solutions for the future of financial services – and, in turn, for all of us.
“There’s hardly an organisation you can talk to that isn’t interested in artificial intelligence and cyber security – the opportunities created and the challenges they might face,” explains Professor Eleanor Shaw OBE, Associate Principal External Engagement and Partnerships at the University of Strathclyde.
“As researchers, it’s really important that we use our expertise to explore those challenges with our external partners and find solutions. That’s how we drive impact.”
And the impact Eleanor describes isn’t just for industry; it’s for all of us, in our everyday financial lives.
“Imagine a world where, regardless of your postcode, you can access good-value, high-quality financial products: mortgages, insurance, advice and guidance. That’s the world we’re working towards at FRIL,” adds Eleanor.
Speak to almost anyone in financial services right now – just like many sectors – and you’ll hear the same underlying tension: the future is arriving faster than most organisations can comfortably absorb.
Technology and consumers. Opportunity and risk. Acceleration and anxiety. The list of modern paradoxes keeps growing. It’s enough to raise the pulse slightly.
That’s why addressing those challenges is at the core of the research undertaken by FRIL. This research is not theory alone. It is applied, fast-moving, tested, and shaped alongside industry and regulators – with real-world consequences in mind. Consequences that mean faster solutions for consumers, greater innovation capacity for banks, and new skills development programmes designed for the next generation of financial services.
“There’s a magic formula at the heart of FRIL, which is why we see the results we do. Actionable research is one of four key ingredients. The others are our Innovation Calls, Knowledge Exchange and Skills and Education programmes. Together, they drive impact and get solutions out into industry quickly,” explains Clare Reid, Strategic Innovation Director at FinTech Scotland. “Our partnerships with the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde are really important in driving research that shapes positive outcomes.”
Preparing for the future now
So, how does this actionable research actually work? Mark Cummins, Professor of Financial Technology and Lead Investigator at the University of Strathclyde, explains:
“At the University of Strathclyde translation of research has always been a key focus. We work in fundamental research and publications are critical – they build credibility, but we also work hard to translate that research into impact.
“At the University of Strathclyde, for example, we use cluster mechanisms to coordinate expertise across different areas. I lead our FinTech cluster, and those clusters are a key way of translating research for real-world impact.
“What FRIL brings is a mechanism for bringing all the stakeholders into one room: financial services, professional services, fintechs, regulators and others. That coordination gives us a reach that can be difficult to replicate in other ways.”
And that connection to industry and regulators is key:
“We draw on our academic knowledge to deliver applied research set by companies and regulators, and connect that directly to skills development and real industry challenges,” adds John Finch, Professor of Marketing at the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow and another Lead Investigator for FRIL.
FRIL research starts with real, live problems ranging from consumer vulnerability to operational resilience. The research activities bring banks, fintechs, regulators, and technology firms together to turn those challenges into direct, applied research built for a rapidly moving environment and evolving consumer needs. And it is a model that is appealing to action orientated academics.
“One of the key reasons I came back to academia was the chance to work on these white papers with industry,” says Steve Owens, a knowledge exchange fellow at the University of Strathclyde, and an engineer by trade. “We take real use cases and put academic research around them, then get that knowledge back out quickly. The focus is on getting useful insight into industry hands as quickly as possible.”
That research is increasingly boundary-pushing, and spans explainable AI, multi-modal generative AI, earth intelligence using satellite data, and agentic systems, but always tied back to regulatory and market needs.
The FRIL research model blends open and applied innovation. White papers are published openly so the wider sector can benefit.
Meeting needs
For banks, this means the research environment that FRIL offers becomes a home for strategic insights.
“We’re an insight-led team,” explains Nicole Alston, Programmes and Community Engagement Manager from Natwest. “FRIL gives us visibility across disruptive technologies and emerging sectors. We know we can’t build everything internally and that this is a two-way exchange.”
And that two-way exchange is critical, because at the centre of this high-tech research, is a clear purpose to tackle very human needs.
“If we apply technology correctly in financial services, we can drive greater inclusion and economic prosperity,” Eleanor reminds us.
Consumer vulnerability and consumer duty are recurring themes across FRIL research, but all of these areas are deeply nuanced where ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions won’t cater for the needs of all those in society. John helps explain:
“Vulnerability isn’t always permanent; it can be linked to life stage and personal circumstances. Insights from firms who see this day to day often reshape how and where we focus our research.”
Those insights are increasingly being translated into practical tools, and Advanced AI research is being applied directly to consumer outcomes.
But what does all of that actually mean? Well, just a few of those examples include identifying potential discrimination in financial decision-making, bringing financial advice and guidance to the masses rather than the few, and building voice-led digital interfaces that help people with reading or learning difficulties access support more easily. This is work that matters for everyday people.
And for technology partners, the value lies in bringing together the academic rigour with market urgency.
“We take hypotheses from industry challenges and shape them into structured research with academic partners,” says John Donoghue, Chief Technology Officer at Sopra Steria, a major tech firm with over 50,000 employees worldwide.
Students are embedded too – through live projects, dissertations, and industry-defined challenges, with the aim of building future skills alongside present solutions
“Students and researchers test and explore the challenges through projects and dissertations, then play findings back to us. We feed that directly into our product and strategy thinking,” adds John.
“This matters because we want to stay at the front edge of the industry,” he explains. “Working on challenges alongside – or ahead of – our clients helps us respond proactively and differentiate.”
People and collaboration
Across every voice we speak to, there is one theme that repeats: collaboration is essential – critical, even:
“Actionable research is crucial,” adds Kal Bukovski, Head of Academia and Research at Sopra Steria. “We bring together regulators, firms and technical practitioners so everyone takes something practical away. It’s about answering the what, why and how, not just describing the problem.”
With such a focus on technology, it may be surprising that what really drives FRIL’s research environment is a community of people who place a strong emphasis on meaningful and productive relationships. Mark explains:
“Our research, skills and education activities are all built on relationships. FRIL gives us a unique environment to build those and to translate research into real use.”
Research with purpose
This is research that doesn’t sit still. It moves quickly into white papers, innovation calls, student projects, product strategy, workforce upskilling and regulatory thinking. Kate Blatchford- Hick is Head of Consumer Investments Policy and Market Analysis at the Financial Conduct Authority and explains how the work drives impact for the regulators:
“FRIL’s research is really valuable as part of the market analysis, horizon scanning and insight work that we do. The work on AI and open finance, for example, helps deepen the evidence base around how emerging technologies are shaping consumer decision-making, both now and in the future. That, in turn, strengthens the FCA’s ability to anticipate market behaviours, risks and innovation, and helps us prioritise policy work that responds to both the opportunities and the potential risks.”
And while insights from FRIL are actively informing regulation and policy, they are also shaping a new generation of skills programmes designed for a rapidly changing sector. Earlier this year, FRIL launched the FRIL Skills Academy. The academy is a first-of-its-kind skills and education platform created to address capability gaps and support career development across financial and professional services and the wider fintech community.
Delivered with academic partners at the University of Strathclyde and the University of Glasgow, the Skills Academy responds directly to the accelerating pace of technological change, particularly in areas such as AI, data quality, and regulatory compliance, where talent shortages continue to slow innovation and increase recruitment costs.
FRIL research has highlighted persistent skills gaps across the sector, reinforcing the need for sustained, strategic investment in workforce development to maintain the UK’s global competitiveness.
“This is a new benchmark for how academia and industry partner at pace,” says Clare Reid, Strategic Innovation Director at FinTech Scotland.
And this point leads us to the nub of FRIL research. This research doesn’t just help us understand change, it informs how we shape it. That’s what makes this model so distinctive.
“I believe in this research because it’s about doing good quickly, we’re not just producing journal outputs, but creating real industry impact and addressing real consumer needs, right here and right now,” concludes Mark.
At the centre of FRIL’s research is a common theme – in a world of rapid change, we need to think differently and act boldly. That same mindset runs through the fintech world, where pushing boundaries, breaking ground, and creating new ways forward are part of the DNA.
As Kal puts it: “Fintech is a kind of art: you have to think beyond the limits and create something new that genuinely serves the right purpose.”
And that is FRIL research.
‘Innovation in financial regulation’ might not sound like the catchiest tagline, but it is at the heart of making the world better for all of us – today, tomorrow and in the decades that come.
What next?
Interested in the research generated by FRIL? Then check out our White Papers across a range of subjects.
If you’re interested in the work of FRIL more generally and would like to contact a member of the team email: FRIL@fintechscotland.com.