Guide to Promoting Financial & Regulatory Innovation: Insights from the UK

Abstract

This guide has been created with the purpose of reviewing, synthesising and distilling the various regulation innovation initiatives of the Financial Conduct Authority in recent years with a primary focus on Project Innovate and in particular, the much-lauded Innovate Regulatory Sandbox which has been replicated in well over twenty countries to date. The guide seeks to provide valuable insights into the UK’s experience of fostering financial innovation for the benefit of other regulators and authorities seeking to address and stimulate both financial and regulatory innovation in their respective jurisdictions and for their objectives.

While this guide has been designed to be widely accessible to those interested in the FCA’s innovation activities, this project emerged from an initiative led by the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (the FCO) to primarily assist regulators and policymakers in China to understand and gather insights on the UK’s financial innovation activities. The project emerged from a collaboration between the research teams at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and the Academy of Internet Finance at Zhejiang University, China.