The Smart Data Foundry

Smart Data Foundry has a purpose to inspire innovation and improve people’s lives by unlocking the power of financial data.

They are a spin-out from the University of Edinburgh’s flagship £600m Data-Driven Innovation programme.  As part of the journey to become an independent not-for-profit organisation, Smart Data Foundry received initial seed capital from the UK Government’s Department for Business, Innovation & Industrial Strategy through the UK Research & Innovation Strength in Places Fund.

A FinTech Scotland Strategic Partner

Smart Data Foundry is a core strategic partner with FinTech Scotland, working across the cluster as a trusted partner for providing data to inspire and accelerate innovation.

Data-Inspired Innovation

Data is at the heart of innovation. Working with real data requires sensitive handling, to maintain and protect the privacy of the data subjects.
Smart Data Foundry recognises this and uses a mix of approaches to unlock the power of financial data while maintaining and respecting privacy.

Deidentified private data

UK Financial Institutions like NatWest Group, Sage and Equifax securely share ‘real’ data with Smart Data Foundry, which is then hosted in their financial data safe haven.

Synthetic data

Smart Data Foundry’s deep understanding of real data means they can create synthetic data, making it possible to unlock the power of the data to inspire innovation, helping to test new ideas, build prototypes and proofs of concept without compromising the privacy risk of sharing this data.

Open Data

Smart Data Foundry curates Open Data to make it easy to access to support the innovation cycle.

Working with Smart Data Foundry

There are many benefits of working with Smart Data Foundry to access quality data to inspire and accelerate innovation.

  • Accelerate product and service development and investment
  • Access to synthetic data to reduce risks and speed up delivery
  • Streamline industry and academic partnerships
  • Support policy evolution
  • Test ideas and propositions and prove they work
  • Reduce innovation timescales, risks and costs
  • Deliver better, faster, higher-resolution research
  • Support applications to national funding initiatives
  • Enable research into Machine Learning applications
  • Foster industry collaboration and policy evolution

Talk to Martin.Nel@ed.ac.uk to find out how Smart Data Foundry can inspire and accelerate innovation through data.