The Financial Conduct Authority has said its digital sandbox will be available permanently on August 1, 2023 to open up the platform to a broader range of businesses, start-ups and data providers.
The digital sandbox is a testing environment that means firms can be supported at the early stage of product development by enabling experimentation.
Alongside innovators, the permanent sandbox also welcomes data providers to apply to list their data on the platform and gain traffic and insights on its usage.
Until now, the platform has only been available temporarily to those participating in pilots and tech sprints.
The regulator said it opted to make it permanent after having two successful pilots.
The FCA said the digital sandbox works to foster innovation and growth.
It said more than half of the previous small to medium enterprise participants in the pilots and techsprints made positive developments including launching new products, securing funding and partnerships, or receiving industry awards or recognitions.
The permanent sandbox is part of a range of market facing tools and initiatives it offers to support innovative firms to launch new products and services.
The City watchdog said it will also help deliver its new secondary objective to support economic growth and international competitiveness.
Digital sandbox features
Participants in the sandbox will have permanent access to datasets and application programme interfaces (APIs) - including over 200 synthetic, public or anonymised data sets and over 1,000 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.
It will also have data security protection to allow experimentation while safeguarding the data assets on the platform and will be a a collaborative platform to allow diversity of thought, share learnings and foster an ecosystem between teams, observers and mentors.
Another feature will be an observation deck to allow those interested, such as regulators, to observe in-flight testing at a technical level.
From August 1, firms will be able to apply under any of the following themes:
- banking
- investment
- lending
- payments
- insurance
- pension
- wholesale buy-side
- wholesale sell-side
- cross-sectors
The FCA said firms will be assessed against the following criteria: in scope, genuine innovation, consumer benefit, readiness and need for support.
The approval process will take a maximum of four weeks.
sonia.rach@ft.com
What's your view?
Have your say in the comments section below or email us: ftadviser.newsdesk@ft.com
