UK FCA Launches Permanent Digital Sandbox for Innovators and Data Providers

Fazzaco learned that the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has announced the launch of a permanent Digital Sandbox, a testing environment that allows innovators and data providers to experiment with new products and services using high-quality data sets and APIs. The permanent Sandbox will be open for applications from 1 August 2023 under various themes, such as banking, insurance, payments, and cross-sectors.

The FCA said that the permanent Sandbox is part of its efforts to support innovation and growth in the financial sector, as well as to deliver its new secondary objective to support economic growth and international competitiveness. The FCA also said that the permanent Sandbox will build on the success of its previous pilots and TechSprints, which helped more than half of the participating Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to make positive developments, such as launching new products, securing funding and partnerships, or receiving industry awards or recognitions.

The permanent Sandbox will offer participants the following features:

• High-quality datasets and Application Programme Interfaces (APIs): Including over 200 synthetic, public or anonymised data sets and over 1000 APIs to enable testing and validation of technology solutions. The range covers payments and transactions data, social media data, investment, Companies House and credit data.

• ​Robust data security protection: The platform has an integrated development environment to allow experimentation while safeguarding the data assets on the platform.

• ​A collaborative platform: To facilitate diversity of thought, share learnings and foster an ecosystem between teams, observers and mentors.

• An observation deck: To enable interested parties such as regulators, incumbents and others to observe in-flight testing at a technical level.

To apply for the permanent Digital Sandbox, applicants will need to demonstrate that they meet the following criteria:

• ​in scope

• ​genuine innovation

• ​consumer benefit

• ​readiness

• ​need for support

The approval process will take a maximum of 4 weeks. More information on how to apply and what the FCA is looking for will be available on its website from 1 August 2023.

Source: UK FCA