In a bid to support firms at the early stage of product development, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) — the financial regulatory body of the United Kingdom — is making its piloted digital sandbox permanent and more open from 1 August 2023.

Firms situated in sectors such as banking, investment, payments, insurance, wholesale, and more will be able to apply for access to the testing environment, where proof of concepts can be experimented with.

The sandbox has so far only been made temporarily available to those participating in pilot runs and the FCA’s TechSprints scheme.

With the digital sandbox, approved firms will have access to over 200 synthetic, public, or anonymised data sets and over 1,000 APIs to support the testing and validation of digital solutions.

The data available covers transactions and payments data, social media data, investment data, credit data, and data from Companies House.

The sandbox also has an “integrated development environment” to safeguard the data assets on the platform while experimentation gets underway.

As solutions are iterated on, the sandbox can help facilitate collaboration between teams, mentors, and observers. Measures include an “observation deck,” where the likes of regulators and incumbents can observe in-flight testing at a technical level.

The FCA stated that more than half of the SME participants in the pilots and TechSprints made “positive developments including launching new products, securing funding and partnerships, or receiving industry awards or recognitions.”

The process for participant approval is planned to take a maximum of four weeks, and applicants will be assessed against the criteria of scope, innovation, consumer benefit, readiness, and need for support.

In addition to innovators, the FCA also welcomes data providers to apply to list their data on the platform, thereby gaining traffic and insights on its usage.

Further information on what the FCA is looking for and how to apply will be provided at this link from 1 August.

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The last time DIGIT previously reported on the FCA was last week, when the National Audit Office launched a review to assess the regulator’s readiness to manage a growing list of responsibilities, including the overseeing of the crypto sector and risks surrounding artificial intelligence.

Previous to that, on 13 July, DIGIT published a story on how Nikhil Rathi, the Chief Executive of the FCA, said that artificial intelligence could disrupt the financial services sector in “ways and at a scale not seen before,” and warned that the regulator would be forced to take action against AI-based fraud.