Speech by Jessica Rusu, FCA chief data, information and intelligence officer, delivered at London Tech Week 2025.
Speaker: Jessica Rusu, chief data, information and intelligence officer
Event: London Tech Week 2025
Delivered: 9 June 2025
Note: This is a drafted speech and may differ from the delivered version
Reading time: 7 minutes
Highlights
- We've set out a bold 5-year strategy to deepen trust, rebalance risk, support growth and improve lives.
- In January, we launched the FCA's AI Lab to deepen our understanding of the risks and opportunities AI presents to consumers and markets. The AI Lab features 4 zones: the AI Sprint, the AI Input Zone, an AI Spotlight, and the Supercharged Sandbox.
- We will be bringing Nvidia tooling and resources to users of the Supercharged Sandbox – accelerating AI innovation and development.
It's an honour to be here at Olympia London, a place that has stood for innovation for over a century. From showcasing electric lights in the 1890s to hosting London Tech Week in 2025, this venue has always been a gateway to the future.
And today, quite unusually, I will share the story of how a UK regulator is innovating not just the way we work but also developing technology to help shape the future of financial services.
What does the future of financial services look like with AI?
Will it be safe? Will it drive economic growth? Will it help consumers? And what about financial crime?
Most certainly, financial services will need a regulator that not only understands technology, but leans in, and can help firms navigate AI adoption.
FCA strategy
At the FCA, we are evolving. We've set out a bold 5-year strategy to deepen trust, rebalance risk, support growth and improve lives.
We’re focusing on 4 key priorities, one of which is to become a smarter, more adaptive regulator. A regulator that supports innovation, leverages technology, and drives growth while delivering for consumers and markets.
In a fast-moving landscape, our job is not just to keep up. It’s to lead.
Supporting growth and UK competitiveness
The UK is already a global FinTech leader, having experienced significant growth over the past decade. This growth peaked in 2021, when the sector raised a record $18 billion in funding.
We know that regulation plays a key role in enabling growth. Our regulatory sandbox, launched over 10 years ago, helps firms navigate the UK, fostering an environment where good ideas thrive, where firms can innovate, and where consumers benefit.
We are working closely with Government and industry to evolve our approach, to ensure the UK remains the best place to develop and deploy financial technologies, including AI.
AI Lab
That brings me to our AI Lab.
In January, we launched the FCA's AI Lab to deepen our understanding of the risks and opportunities AI presents to consumers and markets, and its real-world implications.
This is not just an internal project.
It's a commitment to supporting industry with AI, a Lab that acknowledges that AI is evolving, and embraces experimentation, learning and testing.
The AI Lab features 4 zones: the AI Sprint, the AI Input Zone, the AI Spotlight, and the Supercharged Sandbox, and I’m going to guide you through that Lab now, including the details on our big announcement on our partnership with Nvidia.
Firstly, getting AI right requires engagement. Engagement with think tanks, academics, industry, investors, and consumers. The AI Sprint, held in person over 2 days, brought together regulators, technologists and industry leaders to envisage how AI will impact financial services, and inform our regulatory approach to AI. This engagement formed our outcome-based approach to AI regulation.
The AI Input Zone creates space to share views on what are likely to be the most transformative AI use cases in financial services – for example, in market monitoring, fraud detection, consumer financial inclusion, and agentic AI, and how effective our current regulatory framework is and how we may need to adapt in the future to enable beneficial innovation.
The feedback we received showed strong support for an outcome and principles-based approach to AI. We heard that introducing a separate AI-specific framework wouldn’t be helpful at this stage.
We will continue to rely on our existing frameworks, like the Consumer Duty and the Senior Managers Regime, to avoid introducing additional regulations for AI.
But we also heard that firms want practical support in how they can apply existing frameworks to AI.
And that brings us to the next component: the AI Spotlight, which highlights practical use cases across the sector. We invited innovators to present their experiments with AI in financial services and showcase their solutions.
I am often asked to share examples of what good looks like.
Therefore, I’m pleased to unveil the FCA's AI Spotlight digital repository, an interactive platform where you can explore real-world AI solutions in financial services.
Users can browse a wide range of innovators, filter by themes or use cases, and build custom collections aligned to cross-cutting topics of interest - such as explainability, fraud detection, or sustainability.
The repository is part of the FCA's AI Lab and supports our commitment to enable safe and responsible AI adoption in UK financial services.
AI Live Testing
We’re also going further.
In April, we announced the next step in experimentation in the AI Lab – our AI Live Testing.
This is novel – AI Live Testing will provide firms the opportunity to test newly developed AI solutions with the regulator during the product development lifecycle.
It allows firms and the FCA to work together to test AI models, in a live and safe environment, enabling firms to receive appropriate regulatory support and comfort.
The goal is to build a shared understanding of how to evaluate and deploy AI responsibly in financial services – especially in consumer-facing applications.
We are seeking views from firms, via our engagement paper, about how this service can help them to deploy safe and responsible AI.
Just a heads-up: the consultation is closing this week – so if you want to have your say, now’s the time.
Supercharged Sandbox announcement
And this brings me to our latest Tech Innovation…
For entrepreneurs, start-ups, or firms who don’t have their own AI infrastructure.
We are 'Supercharging' our Digital Sandbox, offering greater computing power, enriched datasets, and more sophisticated tooling, so firms can build their early-stage proof of concept models with support from the regulator.
Today, as part of our commitment to advancing innovation through AI, I’m pleased to formally announce that we are collaborating with Nvidia on this effort. Working with our Sandbox partners, NayaOne, we will be bringing Nvidia tooling and resources to users of the Supercharged Sandbox – accelerating AI innovation and development.
The Supercharged Sandbox significantly upgrades our existing Sandbox programme, offering advanced Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) compute resource, enabling users to efficiently train, refine, and experiment with cutting-edge AI models.
- Participating firms will have access to Nvidia AI Enterprise software suite, a cloud-native suite of software tools, libraries, and frameworks, that accelerate and simplify the development, deployment, and scaling of AI applications.
- We will also provide access to a wide range of resources and training materials through the Supercharged Sandbox, including NVIDIA’s catalogue of ‘GTC On-Demand Sessions’ and their Deep Learning Institute – bringing the latest in AI and accelerated computing straight into the hands of Supercharged Sandbox users.
- Participants can tap into NVIDIA’s wider ecosystem, forging connections to spark collaboration and innovation.
- Applications for the Supercharged Sandbox are now officially open, and firms will be able to test early-stage proof of concepts (PoCs) in the Supercharged Sandbox from October 2025.
- We invite innovators, firms, and researchers to submit their AI experimentation proposals. This is your opportunity to prototype bold ideas in a safe, supportive environment, and help shape the future of AI innovation.
Closing remarks
I set out to tell you the story of a regulator that not only understands technology, but leverages it internally and externally.
We are committed to leveraging technology to improve our operations.
We are continuing to digitise and simplify our authorisation forms.
We are decommissioning legacy data returns and optimising the data collections journey. We’re streamlining the Handbook and moving towards a machine-readable version.
We’ve launched our new digital portal MyFCA to manage core interactions with us all in one place.
We are using AI to assist staff with intelligence gathering and caseflow management.
And now, the FCA’s Supercharged Digital Sandbox, Powered by NayaOne and supercharged by Nvidia, will strengthen the UK’s position as a Global FinTech Leader, aligned with the UK Government’s growth agenda and AI Opportunities Action Plan.
It’s a chance to show why the UK remains the most attractive destination for financial services start-ups, helping to draw top global talent in AI, reinforcing our leadership among global financial regulators and central banks, positioning the UK at the forefront of driving innovation in AI.
The FCA is here to help make that happen.
Because when it comes to innovation, we believe in regulation with purpose.
