Our biannual Innovation Services Expo showcases innovations that are driving positive change in financial services.
The FCA Innovation Services Expo is a biannual initiative that showcases innovative products and services with support from our suite of innovation services: the Regulatory Sandbox, Digital Sandbox, and Innovation Pathways. These Expos highlight pioneering solutions that are driving positive change in financial services.
Join us at the next Expo
Join us to explore live demonstrations of innovative solutions, participate in engaging panel discussions, and connect with representatives from FCA Innovation, incubators, accelerators, academics, and the broader fintech ecosystem. Held every spring and autumn, this event offers a unique platform to explore the future of financial innovation.
Stay informed on updates and registration details as we continue to foster collaboration and drive innovation in financial services by registering your expression of interest.
Innovation themes
The Innovation Services Expo focuses on how firms supported through those services have addressed critical challenges and opportunities in financial services. By focusing on targeted innovation themes, the Expo showcases how firms drive meaningful change.
These themes evolve alongside the sector’s dynamic landscape, ensuring they reflect emerging trends and shifting industry priorities.
Below are some of the themes explored at our previous Expos:
- Data enablement: Tools unlocking the value of data for better decision-making and strategic insights.
- Financial inclusion: Projects breaking down barriers to financial access for underserved communities.
- Fraud detection: Advanced technologies tackling financial crime, including authorised push payment fraud and money laundering prevention.
- RegTech: Cutting-edge solutions simplifying regulatory compliance with AI and advanced analytics.
- WealthTech: Innovations transforming wealth management through personalised investment strategies and accessible portfolio tools.
Showcased innovations
2024 Autumn Expo presenting teams
Here are the teams that showcased their innovations at the 2024 Autumn Expo, hosted at the FCA London office. To view detailed descriptions, please see the project overview brochure.
WealthTech
| Presenters | Description |
|---|---|
| Kestrl | Kestrl is a money app designed to help Muslims manage their finances more effectively. It uses machine learning and generative AI to provide personalised financial advice and solutions. By analysing customers’ financial data through Open Banking, the app delivers tailored recommendations via a ChatGPT-style interface, making interactions more accessible. The AI assistant first assesses each customer’s unique financial needs, then offers personalised budgets, savings plans, and recommends suitable financial products. |
| Reseo | The groundbreaking, universal, investor-centric Reseo e-Business is designed from the perspective of the corporate investor. It is a new proposition for servicing the global B2B investment management industry. Reseo sits between the investor, asset manager and administrator, and is easily accessed through an intuitive digital dashboard. |
| Menna | Menna combines generative AI with rich real-time data to deeply understand each business, providing engaging and relevant support that simplifies decision-making and enhances outcomes. It offers chat, LLM, and AI-driven engagement and support for more accessible information, alerts, and guidance. Additionally, Menna leverages real-time data from a wide range of sources to empower businesses with better understanding, options, and results. |
| Saturn | Saturn records meetings that financial advisers, financial planners and wealth managers conduct with their clients. Using this recording, plus the FCA's guidelines, Saturn can flag risks and missed points from these interactions to reduce risk and improve client experience for firms. Saturn uses custom-built AI, trained on the requirements within the UK advice sector, to give firms and clients peace of mind. |
| Tokens of Appreciation | Tokens of Appreciation is being developed as an impactful employee recognition and reward scheme where the employee can redeem digital points for equity, through fractional/whole ownership of stocks in the company. The TOAPs are earned by employees for achieving pre-set goals. |
| Xcavate | Xcavate is a decentralised, community-driven protocol for real estate investment and tokenisation, designed to enhance transparency, accessibility, and efficiency in the sector while maintaining full regulatory compliance. Xcavate streamlines processes using reusable digital credentials that are cryptographically secured and easily verified. Built on the Polkadot SDK, the protocol automates token transfers, reducing counterparty risks and errors. Its decentralised approach provides global access to early-stage real estate investments with low entry barriers, enabling fractional property ownership and more affordable investment opportunities. |
RegTech
| Presenter | Description |
|---|---|
| Aptitude Global | Aptitude Global specialises in building innovative solutions to fight fraud and financial crime. Their graph-powered Decision Intelligence Platform seamlessly integrates customer and third-party data into a connected network view of individuals, companies and risks (such as sanctions, PEPs, adverse media and ESG). Using this platform, Aptitude Global are exploring new approaches to enhance global sanctions screening compliance using graph data science and machine learning, improving the accuracy of sanctions screening processes and identifying cases of sanctions circumvention. |
| Deriskly | In line with the FCA’s Consumer Duty, firms are expected to ensure that consumers fully understand the products and services offered, providing sufficient information for informed decision-making at the right time, in a clear and accessible manner. Deriskly’s solution evaluates the clarity of financial promotions and communications based on consumer feedback, recommending revised text to improve better understanding. |
| Tazama | Tazama offers a number of fraud and money laundering typologies 'out of the box'. One of these typologies consists of a set of rules to establish the patterns of behaviour that would indicate that the debtor in a transaction is about to become a victim of Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud. The rules evaluate a new transaction against the historical behaviour of the debtor (as the potential victim) and the creditor (as the potential fraudster) to determine if the transaction is APP fraud. The FCA Digital Sandbox assists us in validating the approach and the rules. |
| LexisNexis Risk Solutions | The ThreatMetrix© Digital Identity Network® is a market leading fraud and digital identity product. Combining real-time global transactional data with fraud and risk intelligence data points to make effective risk assessments of fraud. Using synthetic data from the FCA to showcase the product’s capabilities, LexisNexis’s analysis collated the new data with existing sources to develop targeted rulesets aimed at flagging behaviour with a high propensity for scams or mules. The exercise has showcased that additional data sources widen the scope of risk identification and enhance the accuracy of fraud detection in the existing product. |
Data enablement
| Presenter | Description |
|---|---|
| FinCrime Dynamics | FinCrime Dynamics offers leading independent control testing services using crafted behavioural data sources, along with recurring testing services that incorporate updates on recent emerging APP fraud threats. Customers benefit from industry peer control performance data for benchmarking, user access to a custom reporting and dashboard system, and resources designed to help teams build industry-leading controls or calibrate vendor solutions to reduce APP fraud exposure proactively. |
| Kore Labs | WikiKore is the world’s first decentralised, AI-augmented financial services ontology, utilising a dynamic and collaborative platform that crowdsources expertise from global practitioners, consumers, and interested parties to create and refine its content. Its rigorous governance framework and AI-augmented curation process ensure accuracy and relevance, while a rating system evaluates contributions based on attributes like source credibility and description quality. WikiKore supports real-time updates to stay aligned with market developments and trends. |
| Lukango | Small businesses are currently underserved by one-size-fits-all, statically priced insurance products that fail to account for their fluctuating and unpredictable nature, leading to significant underinsurance issues. Lukango addresses this problem with its innovative Flex product, which leverages open finance and machine learning to provide faster, more precise protection and increased profitability. By connecting to customer data, Flex not only enhances immediate coverage but also offers unique insights from additional data points that the market does not currently collect, allowing for the identification of new rating factors and the development of an improved underwriting model over the long term. |
| Verifoxx | Verifoxx is a privacy-preserving, cross compatible layer that enables companies to securely query each other’s data - such as querying red flags, customer activity, or KYC outcomes - without any data ever leaving its owner. Instead of sharing raw data, verified insights are exchanged, enforcing GDPR instead of putting it at risk. Our prototype inside the FCA’s Digital Sandbox focused on two key use cases: combating money laundering by enabling banks to securely exchange intelligence on suspicious transactions and addressing Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud by facilitating intelligence sharing between banks and telecommunications companies to improve fraud detection. |
2024 Spring Expo presenting teams
Here are the teams that showcased their innovations at the 2024 Spring Expo, hosted at the FCA London office. To view detailed descriptions, please see the project overview brochure.
Financial inclusion
| Presenter | Description |
|---|---|
| Finexos | Finexos aims to address financial inclusion and credit poverty issues by providing credit providers with enhanced risk detection tools. Through advanced AI, behavioural analytics, and real-time data, Finexos reduces risk, costs, and default rates, benefiting lenders, borrowers, and society. In the Digital Sandbox, Finexos has developed the next generation of credit risk analysis using open banking to assess retrospective, current, and future views of a borrower’s financial capability. The analytics focus on affordability, probability, and suitability, striving to create a fairer financial landscape. |
| My Life Kit (MLK) | Many financial institutions face challenges in understanding their customers’ circumstances, hindering product innovation and impacting customer experience. Recognising this, MLK empowers banks, insurers, hospitals and governments with a new index and a data insights platform. This enables them to enhance community wellbeing, support customers in leading healthier lives, and overcome market challenges. The innovative approach incorporates health, wealth, environmental, and global data, leveraging advanced AI analytics to create a holistic VioScore™. This revolutionary index coupled with MLK’s insights platform, facilitates informed decision-making and opens avenues for product innovation, risk management, and broader financial inclusion. |
RegTech
| Presenter | Description |
|---|---|
| OneID | Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud is enabled by a lack of identity verification, which enables fraudsters to impersonate others to defraud victims online. Using digital identity enables social media and platform providers to verify that accounts have a traceable human ID with the right FCA permissions, to give better security and make the account owner accountable for their actions. OneID has explored linking to the FCA register to prove a corporate or investment advisor has FCA permissions, to reduce APP scams such as investment fraud. |
| Proofmarked | Proofmarked has created self-sovereign identities for organisations. The product allows organisations to sign their website properties with their trademarked logos, which creates a market-driven allowlist of domains. Proofmarked is the other side of KYC: a way for financial organisations to show to their customers they are who they say they are. With financial institutions adopting Proofmarked, their customers can easily distinguish between a legitimate and an illegitimate website (e.g. clone firms). Thus, preventing financial losses, before people give away their credentials to cybercriminals or fall prey to investment scams (e.g. unauthorised firms). |
| SurferMonkey | SurferMonkey enhances AML/CTF for regulators and supports institutional entry into blockchain with confidence in privacy and compliance. SurferMonkey’s Universal Plugin and Regulatory Dashboard enable secure, private blockchain transactions and offer regulators tools for monitoring and de-anonymizing transactions. The solution utilises Zero-Knowledge Proofs and smart contracts to enhance privacy, block sanctioned addresses, and ensure compliance and security within the blockchain ecosystem. |
Data and enablement
| Presenter | Description |
|---|---|
| Abducere Holdings | The Abducere solution employs a set of cryptographic hashes tailored to each customer’s personal data, generating a unique ‘key’. Importantly, the process of customer matching occurs without the transmission of sensitive personal data outside a firm’s secure domains. This approach significantly enhances data security compared to conventional methods while maintaining the crucial fuzzy logic capability integral to the matching process. The solution is meticulously developed using privacy-by-design software, and its core algorithmic process has received a patent from the European Patent Office (EPO). |
| EKAI | EKAI provides a platform to unpack/summarise & understand newer regulations, so organisations can reduce costs and facilitate digital regulatory reporting (DRR) for retail banks and insurance companies. Many of the newer regulations, like operational resilience and the Consumer Duty, are much more complex than previous ones. The product provides a modularised implementation of regulations delivering required reporting via generative AI. It also provides a ChatGPT-type interface to be used internally by organisations to interrogate the data required for the reports. |
| xcharta | xcharta automates the extraction of data from charts at scale. It’s used by financial analysts, researchers and data teams to unlock data in graphs where source data isn’t readily available. xcharta’s technology combines AI and computer vision techniques to ingest full documents (e.g. a company sustainability report), detect charts and tables and then extract numbers along with relevant contextual metadata (e.g. titles, series names, units). It’s available either as a SaaS platform for individual researchers and analysts to extract from specific documents, or as an API to embed in workflows for systematic extraction. |
Fraud detection
| Presenter | Description |
|---|---|
| Feedzai | Feedzai Scam Prevention enables banks to protect themselves and their customers from Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud by moving from detection to prevention. It collects and analyses customer online activity, transactions, behaviour, device and network to identify and prevent authorised fraud attacks. It empowers banks and payment providers to create multidimensional, customer-centric views across both digital and other channels such as telephony and branch and flags when a customer’s behaviour is out of the ordinary. It uses multidimensional detection layers, optionally combined with existing fraud risk controls to protect customers and improve awareness and trust. |
| Fintelligenx | Fintelligenx utilises advanced AI models to offer API-based signals for preventing Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud throughout the payment lifecycle, including at initiation and near settlement. These APIs assess the risk of APP fraud and assist in identifying fraud typologies. Recognising the dynamic nature of APP fraud, Fintelligenx also focuses on explaining risk scores for emerging attack patterns, even with limited training data for explainability. This approach ensures timely interventions and countermeasures, enhancing the security and integrity of transactions by adapting to evolving fraud tactics. |
| NatWest | Frauds and scams equate to an extremely small proportion of payments on a normal day - 'needle in a haystack'. With the knowledge of NatWest’s customer, their device and additional intelligence on the beneficiary contained within the synthetic dataset, the project focused on helping banks to be better equipped to break the spell of scams. Within real-time payment profiling engines, the project explored additional attributes which could drastically increase NatWest’s proactive fraud and scam detection rates, while also decreasing the impact on genuine customers. |
| Resistant AI | Resistant AI applies machine learning to help firms reduce instances of fraud, with a particular focus on Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud. Resistant develops machine learning models based on ensembles of anomaly detectors and classifiers. Resistant has focused on leveraging the combination of both banking and telco data sources to create a machine learning model that will enable firms to reduce instances of fraud. The model design is such that it allows firms to benefit from the power of data sharing. |
| Trident AI | The project leverages Authorised Push Payment (APP) Fraud synthetic data to train AI agents to investigate card fraud and APP scams. This involves tasks such as transaction analysis, report writing, and customer communication to efficiently gather necessary evidence for investigations with precision. The dataset was enriched with additional transaction details and customer communications. To effectively perform its role, an AI agent must possess a contextual understanding of previous transaction history, customer communications, and current scam tactics. Traditional transaction analysis and report writing processes typically take 30–40 minutes, but the product utilises AI to accomplish these tasks in just a few seconds. |
