Four fintech companies have each been awarded £50,000 to develop technology that helps financial and professional services firms adopt artificial intelligence responsibly, while meeting regulatory expectations.

The £200,000 grant funding was awarded through the Financial Regulation Innovation Lab (FRIL), a collaboration between FinTech Scotland and the University of Strathclyde. Since launching in 2023, FRIL has supported 120 fintechs and awarded a total of £1.35 million in grants to 27 companies.

The awardees were selected after a six-week Innovation Challenge where 14 participants worked directly with 13 global financial and professional services firms — Atos, Baillie Gifford, Barclays, BlackRock, CMS, Equifax, EY, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, M&G, NatWest, PwC and Sopra Steria — shaping their innovations around real, current industry challenges in this space. The Financial Conduct Authority also took part throughout, giving early access to a regulatory perspective.

The Innovation Challenge concluded with a Showcase Day where the fintechs pitched to a panel of industry judges. Participants, including those awarded funding, will now continue to work with industry partners to test and validate their solutions, with the aim of accelerating market fit and moving from pilot to commercial adoption faster.

The four awardees are:

Amplified Global
Amplified Global helps financial services firms measure, improve, and prove the clarity of legal and regulatory communications with AI. Firms get consistent, repeatable results they can evidence to a regulator— cutting the cost of assurance and removing a barrier to deploying AI at scale. The FCA used Amplifi’s intelligibility benchmark in its July 2026 review of pre-sale investment disclosures. The £50,000 grant will fund the development of a beta benchmarking platform for industry, where any firm can score its documents against peer data and benchmark it against that. The company plans to open a Scotland base and create skilled jobs.

NestEgg
NestEgg helps credit unions lend to more people, providing a decision engine, loan matching and referral platform that identify applicants a narrower credit score might decline. The £50,000 will fund staffing, infrastructure and the legal groundwork for informed consent as NestEgg builds LENS, a tool to test AI-driven lending decisions for bias. The aim is more income for credit unions from approvals they would otherwise turn away, and more borrowers in Scotland and across the UK able to access credit affordably.

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Verifoxx
Verifoxx builds trust infrastructure for data and AI: defining what systems are authorised to do, enabling privacy-preserving execution, and independently assessing whether they behaved as trusted agents, within one coherent architecture. The £50,000 will fund a new product feature and validation with an industry partner.

Finspector
Finspector helps regulated firms keep financial promotions and marketing compliant at scale, automating review and monitoring across text, images, video, websites and social media. Potential issues are identified in real time, before or shortly after publication, with audit-ready evidence generated automatically — reducing breach risk and the operational burden of manual review. The £50,000 funding will support Finspector’s commercialisation and go-to-market strategy, while also helping to create new roles and strengthen their presence in Scotland.

Clare Reid, Strategic Innovation Director at FinTech Scotland, commented: “Bringing fintechs, leading firms and the FCA together to solve industry problems in meeting the requirements of regulation has proven a successful way to boost innovation. For the four awardees, the funding will accelerate responsible and explainable AI solutions that make a real difference to the businesses adopting them, their customers and the wider economy.”