Bank of England seeks to innovate services via new FinTech Accelerator

The Bank of England announced the launch of a new Fintech Accelerator on 17 June looking to support businesses able to help it innovate central banking.

BoE governor Mark Carney said in his speech regarding the launch, “‘FinTech heralds the dawn of narrow banking and portfolio optimisation. It will change the nature of money, shake the foundations of central banking and deliver nothing less than a democratic revolution for all who use financial services.”

The Bank will run all funding requests through an assessment procedure and will require the companies to take part in proof of concept projects (POCs).

This will ensure all proposals will lead to real innovation in line with Bank of England’s mission and commercial goals.

The FinTech segments BoE is focusing on initially include data anonymization, cyber security, distributed ledger technology, structuring and analysis of large datasets, machine learning and banking data protection.

The accelerator has already started work on the first three on that list.

Although the Bank has identified these topics as particularly interesting, it is not ruling out any requests.

“We would also welcome expressions of interest from innovative firms in all areas of FinTech that can demonstrate how their work relates to the Bank’s mission,” the BoE has said in an official statement.

In its World Retail Banking Report 2016 consulting firm Capgemini says banks are quickly losing ground to the wave of fast-evolving and flexible FinTech companies.

The report found that over 90 per cent of banking executives are concerned about the progress of FinTech and less than a quarter of them feel they have an edge over FinTech competitors.

The report also found that even though banks have improved their customer experience performance, this did not increase their chances of higher customer retention, referrals or cross sales.

Copyright © 2016 FINTECH GLOBAL