Digital Sandbox | FCA

The Digital Sandbox offers General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant datasets in a secure environment, mentorship from industry experts and access to the FinTech Community to help enable experimentation and scaling for proof of concepts.

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Digital Sandbox

The Digital Sandbox is a service provided by the FCA Innovation Hub, designed to facilitate the development and launch of cutting-edge solutions within the financial services industry.

The service offers participants access to GDPR-compliant data and APIs to explore the art of the possible for solution building, valuable feedback from mentors to refine and optimise solutions and opportunities to become part of the sandbox community and broader FinTech ecosystem.

A typical Digital Sandbox project runs from 3 to 12 months and we welcome applications from all sectors across the financial service industry.

Core features

High-quality data sets and Application Programme Interfaces (APIs)

Marketplace for 300+ synthetic, public, anonymised and pseudonymised data sets and over 1000 API end points. Data scope covers entities, corporate individuals, consumers, transactions, financial statements, loans, credits and investments.

Robust data security protection

Built-in development environment to allow scalable experimentation while safeguarding data assets on the platform.

A collaboration platform

To facilitate diversity of thought, share learnings and foster an ecosystem between participants, mentors and the fintech community.

A showcase space

To enable participants to display their solutions and build business networks while allowing interested parties including the regulators, incumbents and others to observe in-flight testing and gain policy insights.

Marketplace for 300+ synthetic, public, anonymised and pseudonymised data sets and over 1000 API end points. Data scope covers entities, corporate individuals, consumers, transactions, financial statements, loans, credits and investments.

Built-in development environment to allow scalable experimentation while safeguarding data assets on the platform.

To facilitate diversity of thought, share learnings and foster an ecosystem between participants, mentors and the fintech community.

To enable participants to display their solutions and build business networks while allowing interested parties including the regulators, incumbents and others to observe in-flight testing and gain policy insights.

Apply to the Digital Sandbox

If you are an innovative business that wishes to develop your solutions and gain support on data and community access, please follow the steps to apply to the Digital Sandbox:

Apply to the Digital Sandbox

How to access the Digital Sandbox

Step 1: Signing up and creating a profile

Sign up for an account for the digital sandbox platform.

Once signed up to the platform, click on the top right image and select ‘My profile’. Upload a profile image and complete your profile details.

Under the ‘Event’ section, you will be able to view all live and historic events and projects.

Under the ‘API providers’ and ‘Datasets’ sections, you will be able to view descriptions of APIs and data sets.

Step 2: Applying to the Permanent Digital Sandbox

Go to ‘Permanent Digital Sandbox’ under the ‘Event’ section. Navigate to ‘Themes’ tab and please apply to the theme your project operates within or is most relevant to.

The application form includes:

Business details
Applicant details
Innovation details
Future Plan

Step 3: Assessment of eligibility

After receiving your application form, we will assess it against our eligibility criteria and aim to get back to you with a decision within 1 month.

For any queries during this time, please contact [email protected].

Step 4: Accepted to the Permanent Digital Sandbox

Upon success of application, we will set up your project space and a case officer will be assigned to support your project.

Participants are expected to:

Provide regular progress updates and attend check in meetings
Maintain and upload relevant documents to your project area
Provide a video demonstration and summary report at the end of your test
Participate in survey and provide feedback to the Digital Sandbox service

Sign up for an account for the digital sandbox platform.

Once signed up to the platform, click on the top right image and select ‘My profile’. Upload a profile image and complete your profile details.

Under the ‘Event’ section, you will be able to view all live and historic events and projects.

Under the ‘API providers’ and ‘Datasets’ sections, you will be able to view descriptions of APIs and data sets.

Go to ‘Permanent Digital Sandbox’ under the ‘Event’ section. Navigate to ‘Themes’ tab and please apply to the theme your project operates within or is most relevant to.

The application form includes:

Business details
Applicant details
Innovation details
Future Plan

After receiving your application form, we will assess it against our eligibility criteria and aim to get back to you with a decision within 1 month.

For any queries during this time, please contact [email protected].

Upon success of application, we will set up your project space and a case officer will be assigned to support your project.

Participants are expected to:

Provide regular progress updates and attend check in meetings
Maintain and upload relevant documents to your project area
Provide a video demonstration and summary report at the end of your test
Participate in survey and provide feedback to the Digital Sandbox service

Eligibility criteria

Criteria	Key question
In scope	Will your product or service serve UK market and consumers? You don’t need to be UK-based however we do expect you to have certain degree of UK market exposure.
Genuine innovation	Are you proposing innovation that’s significantly different to mainstream offerings? This could be something completely new, or it could be a new market or a new version of an existing model.
Consumer benefit	How does your innovation deliver benefits to the UK consumers and markets? Have you identified the risks embedded within your innovation, and how are they mitigated?
Readiness	Do you have resources and expertise to develop your solutions using the data provided? Do you have clearly defined testing outcomes, success metrics, timelines and go-to-market plans? Do you have a well-thought business plan and revenue model?
Need for support	Can you articulate what data or support you need from the Digital Sandbox and how will you benefit from it?

Contribute to the Digital Sandbox community

In addition, we welcome applications from:

Data providers that wish to display their assets and get feedback
Industry experts, including but not limited to those from incumbents, scale-ups, incubators, investors and industry bodies that wish to share domain knowledge to support innovative businesses and link to the UK FinTech community
Academic institutions that wish to conduct research projects to solve novel problems

To provide data

Apply to become a data provider

To share expertise

Apply to become a mentor

To conduct research

Apply as an academic institution

Apply to become a data provider

Apply to become a mentor

Apply as an academic institution

2024 Spring Expo

We were delighted to host our inaugural FCA Digital Sandbox Spring Expo, which took place on 25 April 2024 at the FCA London office. The Expo showcased 13 innovative projects from the Digital Sandbox service, spanning four key themes: financial inclusion, RegTech, data and enablement, and fraud detection.

Attendees had the opportunity to view live demonstrations of these innovative offerings. In addition to the project showcase, the Expo included panel discussions and networking sessions which allowed attendees to engage with representatives from the Digital Sandbox community, FCA team, incubators, accelerators, academics and the wider fintech ecosystem.

The complete recording of the event can be viewed on the Digital Sandbox platform via this link, following registration.

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.

2024 Spring Expo Presenters	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	Many financial institutions face challenges in understanding their customers’ circumstances, hindering product innovation and impacting customer experience. Recognizing this, MLK empowers banks, insurers, hospitals & 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.
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/CFT 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 utilizes Zero-Knowledge Proofs and smart contracts to enhance privacy, block sanctioned addresses, and ensure compliance and security within the blockchain ecosystem.
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 the Operational Resilience, and Consumer Duty are much more complex than previous ones. The product provides a modularised implementation of regulations delivering required reporting via GenerativeAI. 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), detects 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.
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 authorized 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 counter measures, 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 utilizes AI to accomplish these tasks in just a few seconds.

Evolution of Digital Sandbox

First piloted in 2020, the Digital Sandbox has shown that access to data and collaboration opportunities can stimulate beneficial innovation in the market. Almost 6 in 10 small and medium enterprise participants from the previous 2 pilots have made positive progress including receiving funding and partnership, launching products or receiving industry rewards and recognitions.

You can find out more about the Digital Sandbox pilots here.

Following from the evaluation of the two digital sandbox pilots, we launched the Permanent Digital Sandbox service on 1 August 2023. You can find out more about the Digital Sandbox pilots here.

07/06/2024 : Information added Permanent Digital Sandbox Spring Expo update

07/05/2024 : Information changed Spring Expo details removed

12/02/2024 : Information added

26/10/2023 : Information added How to access the Permanent Digital Sandbox

06/09/2023 : Editorial amendment eligibility criteria

01/08/2023 : Information added permanent Digital Sandbox opened, video

23/02/2023 : Editorial amendment page update as part of the website refresh

27/09/2022 : Editorial amendment General page update

27/03/2022 : Editorial amendment General page update

10/08/2021 : Information added on how to get involved

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